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T."^^ 




-^Sp t})t same ^utlior. 



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The Same. lamo, full gilt, $2.50. 

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VISION OF SIR LAUNFAL. i6mo, 75 cents. 

The Same. Illustrated. Small 4to, ^2.00. 

THE BIG LOW PAPERS. Series I. and II. i2mo, each 

$1.50. 
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THE ROSE. Illustrated. i6mo, ^1.50. 
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HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO., Publishers, 
BOSTON. 



9 



2El)e Hitiers^iDe ^Itiine ^txit& 



ME LIB (E US-HIPPONAX 



THE BIGLOW PAPERS 



EDITED, WITH AN INTRODUCTION, 

NOTES, GLOSSARY, AND 

COPIOUS INDEX 

BY "^ 

HOMER WILBUR, A. M. 

PASTOR OF THE FIRST CHURCH IN JAALAM, AND (PROSPECTIVE) 

MEMBER OF MANY LITERARY, LEARNED, AND 

SCIENTIFIC SOCIETIES 

{/or which see page 13.) 



The ploughman's whistle, or the trivial flute, 
Finds more respect than great Apollo's lute. 

Qziarles's Etnblems, B. II. E. 8 

Margaritas, munde porcine, calcasti : en, siliquas accipe 

jfac. Car. Fil. ad Pub. Leg. § i 




BOSTON 

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 

New York: 11 East Seventeenth Street 

a:f)e 3Stt)crsttie ^res«, CamftriCge 

1885 



'? 






<i 



*> 



^i^A^ 



Copyright, 1848 and 1876, 
Br JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 

Copyright, 1885, 
Bt HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO. 

All rights reserved. 



48 6555 

JUL 17 1942 



ITie Riverside Press, Cambridge : 
Blectrotyped and Printed by H. 0. Houghton & Ca 



CONTENTS. 



Note to Title-Page 9 

Introduction 15 

No. I. — A Letter from Mr. Ezekiel Biglow 
OF Jaalam to the Hon. Joseph T. Bucking- 
ham, Editor of the Boston Courier, in- 
closing A PoEJi OF his Son, Mr. Hosea 
Biglow 52 

No. II. — A Letter from Mr. Hosea Biglow to 
THE Hon. J. T. Buckingham, Editor of the 
Boston Courier, covering a Letter from 
Mr. B. Sawin, Private in the Massachu- 
setts Regiment 61 

No. III. — What Mr. Robinson thinks ... 77 

No. IV. — Remarks of Increase D. O'Phace, 
Esquire, at an Extrumpery Caucus in 
State Street, reported by Mr. H. Big- 
low 91 

No. V. — The Debate in the Sennit. Sot to 

A Nusry Rhyme 108 



VI CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

No. VI. — The Pious Editor's Ceeed. . . .118 

No. VII. — A Letter from a Candidate for 
THE Presidency in Answer to suttin 
Questions proposed by Mr. Hosea Big- 
low, inclosed in a Note from Mr. Biglow 
to S. H. Gay, Esq., Editor of the Na- 
tional Anti-slavery Standard .... 128 

No. VIII. — A Second Letter from B. Sawin, 
Esq 141 

No. IX. — A Third Letter from B. Sawin, Esq. 162 

Glossary 183 

Index • 187 



NOTE TO TITLE-PAGE. 

It will not have escaped tlie attentive eye 
that I have, on the title-page, omitted those 
honorary appendages to the editorial name 
which not only add greatly to the value of 
every book, but whet and exacerbate the 
appetite of the reader. For not only does 
he surmise that an honorary membership of 
literary and scientific societies implies a cer- 
tain amount of necessary distinction on the 
part of the recipient of such decorations, but 
he is willing to trust himself more entirely 
to an author who writes under the fearful 
responsibility of involving the reputation of 
such bodies as the S. Archceol. Dahom.^ or 
the Acad. Lit. et Sclent. Kamtschat. I 
cannot but think that the early editions of 
Shakspeare and Milton would have met with 
more rapid and general acceptance, but for 
the barrenness of their respective title-pages ; 
and I believe that, even now, a publisher of 
the works of either of those justly distin- 
guished men would find his account in pro- 



10 NOTE TO TITLE-PAGE. 

curing their admission to the membersMp of 
learned bodies on the Continent, — a pro- 
ceeding no whit more incongruous than the 
reversal of the judgment against Socrates, 
when he was already more than twenty cen- 
turies beyond the reach of antidotes, and 
when his memory had acquired a deserved 
respectability. I conceive that it was a 
feeling of the importance of this precaution 
which induced Mr. Locke to style himself 
" Gent." on the title-page of his Essay, as 
who should say to his readers that they 
could receive his metaphysics on the honor 
of a gentleman. 

Nevertheless, finding that, without de- 
scending to a smaller size of type than would 
have been compatible with the dignity of the 
several societies to be named, I could not 
compress my intended list within the limits 
of a single page, and thinking, moreover, 
that the act would carry with it an air of 
decorous modesty, I have chosen to take the 
reader aside, as it were, into my private 
closet, and there not only exhibit to him the 
diplomas which I already possess, but also 
to furnish him with a prophetic vision of 
those which I may, without undue presump- 
tion, hope for, as not beyond the reach of 



NOTE TO TITLE-PAGE. 11 

human ambition and attainment. And I am 
the rather induced to this from the fact that 
my name has been unaccountably dropped 
from the last triennial catalogue of our be- 
loved Alma Mater. Whether this is to be 
attributed to the difficulty of Latinizing any 
of those honorary adjuncts (with a com- 
plete list of which I took care to furnish the 
proper persons nearly a year beforehand), 
or whether it had its origin in any more cul- 
pable motives, I forbear to consider in this 
place, the matter being in course of painful 
investigation. But, however this may be, 
I felt the omission the more keenly, as I 
had, in expectation of the new catalogue, 
enriched the library of the Jaalam Athe- 
naeum with the old one then in my posses- 
sion, by which means it has come about that 
my children will be deprived of a never- 
wearying winter-evening's amusement in 
looking out the name of their parent in that 
distinguished roll. Those harmless inno- 
cents had at least committed no but I 

forbear, having intrusted my reflections and 
animadversions on this painful topic to the 
safekeeping of my private diary, intended 
for posthumous publication. I state this fact 
here, in order that certain nameless individ- 



12 NOTE TO TITLE-PAGE. 

uals, wlio are, perhaps, overmucli congratu- 
lating themselves upon my silence, may know 
tliat a rod is in pickle which the vigorous 
hand of a justly incensed posterity will ap- 
ply to their memories. 

The careful reader will note, that, in the 
list which I have prepared, I have included 
the names of several Cisatlantic societies to 
which a place is not commonly assigned in 
processions of this nature. I have ventured 
to do this, not only to encourage native am- 
bition and genius, but also because I have 
never been able to perceive in what way dis- 
tance (unless we suppose them at the end of 
a lever) could increase the weight of learned 
bodies. As far as I have been able to ex- 
tend my researches among such stuffed spe- 
cimens as occasionally reach America, I have 
discovered no generic difference between the 
antipodal Fog rum Japonicum and the F, 
Americcmum sufficiently common in our own 
immediate neighborhood. Yet, with a be- 
coming deference to the popular belief, that 
distinctions of this sort are enhanced in value 
by every additional mile they travel, I have 
intermixed the names of some tolerably dis- 
tant literary and other associations with the 
rest. 



NOTE TO TITLE-PAGE. 13 

I add here, also, an advertisement, which, 
that it may be the more readily understood 
by those persons especially interested therein, 
I have written in that curtailed and other- 
wise maltreated canine Latin, to the writing 
and reading of which they are accustomed. 

Omnib. per tot. Orb. Terrar. Catalog. Academ. 
Edd. 

Minim, gent, diplom. ab inclytiss. acad. vest, orans, 
vir. honorand. operosiss., at sol. ut sciat. quant, glor. 
nom. meum (dipl. fort, concess.) catal. vest. temp, 
futnr. affer., ill. subjec., addit. omnib. titul. honorar. 
qu. adh. non tant. opt. quam probab. put. 
*^* LitU Uncial, distinz. ut Prces. S. Hist. Nat. Jaal. 

HOMER US WILBUR, Mr., Episc. Jaalam, S. 
T. D. 1850, et Yal. 1849, et Neo-Cses. et Brun. et 
Gulielm. 1852, et Gul. et Mar. et Bowd. et Georgiop. 
et Viridimont. et Columb. Nov. Ebor. 1853, et Am- 
herst, et Watervill. et S. Jarlath. Hib. et S. Mar. et 
S. Joseph, et S. And. Scot. 1854, et Nashvill. et Dart, 
et Dickins. et Concord, et Wash, et Columbian, et 
Chariest, et Jeff, et Dubl. et Oxon. et Cantab, et caet. 
1855, P. U. N. C. H. et J. U. D. Gott. et Osnab. et 
Heidelb. 1860, et Acad. Bore us. Berolin. Soc. et 
SS. RR. Lugd. Bat. et Patav. et Lond. et Edinb. et 
Ins. Feejee. et Null. Terr, et Pekin. Soc. Hon. et S. 
H. S. et S. P. A. et A. A. S. et S. Humb. Univ. et 
S. Omn. Rer. Quarund. q. Aliar. Promov. Passama- 
quod. et H. P. C. et I. O. H. et A. A. *. et n. K. P. 
et *. B. K. et Peucin. et Erosoph. et Philadelph. et 



14 NOTE TO TITLE-PAGE. 

Frat. in Unit, et 2. T. et S. Archseolog. Atlien. et 
Acad. Scient. et Lit. Panorm. et SS. R. H. Matrit. et 
Beeloocliist. et Caffrar. et Caribb. et M. S. Reg. Paris, 
et S. Am. Antiserv. Soc. Hon. et P. D. Gott. et LL. D. 
1852, et D. C. L. et Mus. Doc. Oxon. 1860, et M. M. 
S. S. et M. D. 1854, et Med. Fac. Univ. Harv. Soc. 
et S, pro Convers. PoUywog. Soc. Hon. et Higgl. 
Piggl. et LL. B. 1853, et S. pro Christianiz. Moschet. 
Soc, et SS. Ante-Diluv. ubiq. Gent. Soc. Hon. et Civit. 
Cleric. Jaalam. et S. pro Diffus. General. Tenebr. 
Secret. Corr. 



INTRODUCTION. 



When, more than three years ago, my tal- 
ented young parishioner, Mr. Biglow, came 
to me and submitted to my animadversions 
the first of his poems which he intended to 
commit to the more hazardous trial of a city 
newspaper, it never so much as entered my 
imagination to conceive that his productions 
would ever be gathered into a fair volume, 
and ushered into the august presence of the 
reading public by myself. So little are we 
short-sighted mortals able to predict the 
event ! I confess that there is to me a quite 
new satisfaction in being associated (though 
only as a sleeping partner) in a book which 
can stand by itseK in an independent unity 
on the shelves of libraries. For there is 
always this drawback from the pleasure of 
printing a sermon, that, whereas the queasy 
stomach of this generation will not bear a 
discourse long enough to make a separate 
volume, those religious and godly-minded 



16 INTRODUCTION. 

children (tliose Samuels, if I may call them 
so) of the brain must at first lie buried in 
an undistinguished heap, and then get such 
resurrection as is vouchsafed to them, mum- 
my-wrapt with a score of others in a cheap 
binding, with no other mark of distinction 
than the word " Miscellaneous " printed 
upon the back. Far be it from me to claim 
any credit for the quite unexpected popular- 
ity which I am pleased to find these bucolic 
strains have attained unto. If I know my- 
self, I am measurably free from the itch of 
vanity ; yet I may be allowed to say that 
I was not backward to recognize in them a 
certain wild, puckery, acidulous (sometimes 
even verging toward that point which, in 
our rustic phrase, is termed shut-eye) flavor, 
not wholly unpleasing, nor unwholesome, to 
palates cloyed with the sugariness of tamed 
and cultivated fruit. It may be, also, that 
some touches of my own, here and there, 
may have led to their wider acceptance, al- 
beit solely from my larger experience of lit- 
erature and author ship. 1 

1 The reader curious in such matters may refer (if he can 
find them) to A Sermon preached on the Anniversary of the 
Dark Day ; An Artillery Election Sermon ; A Discourse on 
the Late Eclipse ; Dorcas, a Funeral Sermon on the Death 
of Madam Submit Tidd, Relict of the late Experience Tidd^ 
Esq., etc., etc. 



INTRODUCTION. 17 

I was at first inclined to discourage Mr. 
Biglow's attempts, as knowing that the de- 
sire to poetize is one of the diseases naturally- 
incident to adolescence, which, if the fitting 
remedies be not at once and with a bold hand 
applied, may become chronic, and render one, 
who might else become in due time an orna- 
ment of the social circle, a painful object 
even to nearest friends and relatives. But 
thinking, on a further experience, that there 
was a germ of promise in him which required 
only culture and the pulling up of weeds 
from around it, I thought it best to set be- 
fore him the acknowledged examples of Eng- 
lish compositions in verse, and leave the rest 
to natural emulation. With this view, I ac- 
cordingly lent him some volumes of Pope 
and Goldsmith, to the assiduous study of 
which he promised to devote his evenings. 
Not long afterwards he brought me some 
verses written upon that model, a specimen 
of which I subjoin, having changed some 
phrases of less elegancy, and a few rhymes 
objectionable to the cultivated ear. The 
poem consisted of childish reminiscences, and 
the sketches which follow will not seem des- 
titute of truth to those whose fortunate edu- 
cation began in a country village. And, 



18 INTRODUCTION. 

first, let us hang up his charcoal portrait of 
the school-dame. 

" Propt on the marsh, a dwelling now, I see 
The humble school-house of my A, B, C, 
Where well- drilled urchins, each behind his tire, 
Waited in ranks the wished command to fire. 
Then all together, when the signal came. 
Discharged their a-h abs against the dame, 
Who, 'mid the volleyed learning, firm and calm, 
Patted the furloughed ferule on her palm, 
And, to our wonder, could detect at once 
Who flashed the pan, and who was downright 
dunce. 

There young Devotion learned to climb with ease 
The gnarly limbs of Scripture family-trees, 
And he was most commended and admired 
Who soonest to the topmost twig perspired ; 
Each name was called as many various ways 
As pleased the reader's ear on different days, 
So that the weather, or the ferule's stings, 
Colds in the head, or fifty other things, 
Transformed the helpless Hebrew thrice a week 
To guttural Pequot or resounding Greek, 
The vibrant accent skipping here and there, 
Just as it pleased invention or despair ; 
No controversial Hebraist was the Dame ; 
With or without the points pleased her the same ; 
If any tyro found a name too tough. 
And looked at her, pride furnished skill enough ; 
She nerved her larynx for the desperate thing. 
And cleared the five-barred syllables at a spring. 



IN TROD UCTION. 1 9 

" Ah, dear old times ! there once it was my hap, 
Perched on a stool, to wear the long-eared cap ; 
From books degraded, there I sat at ease, 
A drone, the envy of compulsory bees." 

I add only one further extract, which will 
possess a melancholy interest to all such as 
have endeavored to glean the materials of 
Revolutionary history from the lips of aged 
persons, who took a part in the actual mak- 
ing of it, and, finding the manufacture profit- 
able, continued the supply in an adequate 
proportion to the demand. 

" Old Joe is gone, who saw hot Percy goad 
His slow artillery up the Concord road, 
A tale which grew in wonder, year by year, 
As, every time he told it, Joe drew near 
To the main fight, till, faded and grown gray, 
The original scene to bolder tints gave way ; 
Then Joe had heard the foe's scared double-quick 
Beat on stove drum with one uncaptured stick, 
And, ere death came the lengthening tale to lop, 
Himself had fired, and seen a red-coat drop ; 
Had Joe lived long enough, that scrambling fight 
Had squared more nearly to his sense of right. 
And vanquished Percy, to complete the tale. 
Had hammered stone for life in Concord jail." 

I do not know that the foregoing extracts 
ought not to be called my own rather than 
Mr. Biglow's, as, indeed, he maintained 



20 INTRODUCTION. 

stoutly that my file had left nothing of his 
in them. I should not, perhaps, have felt 
entitled to take so great liberties with them, 
had I not more than suspected an heredi- 
tary vein of poetry in myself, a very near 
ancestor having written a Latin poem in 
the Harvard Gratulatio on the accession of 
George the Third. Suffice it to say, that, 
whether not satisfied with such limited ap- 
probation as I could conscientiously bestow, 
or from a sense of natural inaptitude, I 
know not, certain it is that my young friend 
could never be induced to any further essays 
in this kind. He affirmed that it was to 
him like writing in a foreign tongue, — that 
Mr. Pope's versification was like the regular 
ticking of one of Willard's clocks, in which 
one could fancy, after long listening, a cer- 
tain kind of rhythm or tune, but which yet 
was only a poverty-stricken tich^ tick after 
all, — and that he had never seen a sweet- 
water on a trellis growing so fairly, or in 
forms so pleasing to his eye, as a fox-grape 
over a scrub-oak in a swamp. He added I 
know not what to the effect that the sweet- 
water would only be the more disfigured by 
having its leaves starched and ironed out, 
and that Pegasus (so he called him) hardly 



INTRODUCTION. 21 

looked right with his mane and tail in curl- 
papers. These and other such opinions I 
did not long strive to eradicate, attributing 
them rather to a defective education and 
senses untuned by too long familiarity with 
purely natural objects, than to a perverted 
moral sense. I was the more inclined to 
this leniency since sufficient evidence was 
not to seek, that his verses, as wanting as 
they certainly were in classic polish and 
point, had somehow taken hold of the public 
ear in a surprising manner. So, only setting 
him right as to the quantity of the proper 
name Pegasus, I left him to follow the bent 
of his natural genius. 

There are two things upon which it would 
seem fitting to dilate somewhat more largely 
in this place, — the Yankee character and 
the Yankee dialect. And, first, of the Yan- 
kee character, which has wanted neither open 
maligners, nor even more dangerous enemies 
in the persons of those unskilful painters who 
have given to it that hardness, angularity, 
and want of proper perspective, which, in 
truth, belonged not to their subject, but to 
their own niggard and unskilful pencil. 

New England was not so much the colony 
of a mother country, as a Hagar driven forth 



22 INTRODUCTION. 

into the wilderness. The little self-exiled 
band which came hither in 1620 came not 
to seek gold, but to found a democracy. 
They came that they might have the privi- 
lege to work and pray, to sit upon hard 
benches and listen to painful preachers as 
long as they would, yea, even unto thirty- 
seventhly, if the spirit so willed it. And 
surely, if the Greek might boast his Ther- 
mopylae, where three hundred men fell in re- 
sisting the Persian, we may well be proud of 
our Plymouth Rock, where a handful of men, 
women, and children not merely faced, but 
vanquished, winter, famine, the wilderness, 
and the yet more invincible storge that drew 
them back to the green island far away. 
These found no lotus growing upon the surly 
shore, the taste of which could make them 
forget their little native Ithaca ; nor were 
they so wanting to themselves in faith as to 
burn their ship, but could see the fair west 
wind belly the homeward sail, and then turn 
unrepining to grapple with the terrible Un- 
known. 

As Want was the prime foe these hardy 
exodists had to fortress themselves against, 
so it is little wonder if that traditional feud 
is long in wearing out of the stock. The 



INTRODUCTION. 23 

wounds of the old warfare were long a-heal- 
ing, and an east wind of hard times puts a 
new ache in every one of them. Thrift was 
the first lesson in their horn-book, pointed out, 
letter after letter, by the lean finger of the 
hard schoolmaster, Necessity. Neither were 
those plump, rosy-gilled Englishmen that 
came hither, but a hard-faced, atrabilious, 
earnest-eyed race, stiff from long wrestling 
with the Lord in prayer, and who had taught 
Satan to dread the new Puritan hug. Add 
two hundred years' influence of soil, climate, 
and exposure, with its necessary result of 
idiosyncrasies, and we have the present Yan- 
kee, full of expedients, half-master of all 
trades, inventive in all but the beautiful, full 
of shifts, not yet capable of comfort, armed 
at all points against the old enemy. Hunger, 
longanimous, good at patching, not so care- 
ful for what is best as for what will do^ with 
a clasp to his purse and a button to his 
pocket, not skilled to build against Time, as 
in old countries, but against sore-pressing 
Need, accustomed to move the world with no 
TTou cTTto but his own two feet, and no lever 
but his own long forecast. A strange hy- 
brid, indeed, did circumstance beget, here in 
the New World, upon the old Puritan stock, 



^ 



24 INTRODUCTION. 

and the earth never before saw such mystic 
practicalism, such niggard-geniality, such 
calculating-fanaticism, such cast-iron-enthusi- 
asm, such unwilling-humor, such close-fisted- 
generosity. This new Grceculus esuriens 
will make a living out of anything. He will 
invent new trades as well as tools. His 
brain is his capital, and he will get education 
at all risks. Put him on Juan Fernandez, 
and he would make a spelling-book first, and 
a salt-pan afterward. In caelum^ jusseris, 
ihit, — or the other way either, — it is all 
one, so anything is to be got by it. Yet, af- 
ter all, thin, speculative Jonathan is more 
like the Englishman of two centuries ago 
than John Bull himself is. He has lost 
somewhat in solidity, has become fluent and 
adaptable, but more of the original ground- 
work of character remains. He feels more 
at home with Fulke Greville, Herbert of 
Cherbury, Quarles, George Herbert, and 
Browne, than with his modern English cou- 
sins. He is nearer than John, by at least a 
hundred years, to Naseby, Marston Moor, 
Worcester, and the time when, if ever, there 
were true Englishmen. John Bull has suf- 
fered the idea of the Invisible to be very 
much fattened out of him. Jonathan is con- 



INTRODUCTION. 25 

scious still that he lives in the world of the 
Unseen as well as of the Seen. To move 
John, you must make your fulcrum of solid 
beef and pudding ; an abstract idea will do 
for Jonathan. 



*^*T0 THE INDULGENT READER. 

My friend, the Reverend Mr. Wilbur, 
having been seized with a dangerous fit of 
illness, before this Introduction had passed 
through the press, and being incapacitated 
for all literary exertion, sent to me his notes, 
memoranda, etc., and requested me to fash- 
ion them into some shape more fitting for 
the general eye. This, owing to the frag- 
mentary and disjointed state of his manu- 
scripts, I have felt wholly unable to do ; yet, 
being unwilling that the reader shovdd be 
deprived of such parts of his lucubrations as 
seemed more finished, and not well discern- 
ing how to segregate these from the rest, I 
have concluded to send them all to the press 
precisely as they are. 

Columbus Nye, 
Pastor of a Church in Bungtown Corner. 



26 IN TROD UCTION. 

It remains to speak of the Yankee dialect. 
And first, it may be premised, in a general 
way, tkat any one much read in the writ- 
ings of the early colonists need not be told 
that the far greater share of the words and 
phrases now esteemed peculiar to New Eng- 
land, and local there, were brought from the 
mother country. A person familiar with the 
dialect of certain portions of Massachusetts 
will not fail to recognize, in ordinary dis- 
course, many words now quoted in English 
vocabularies as archaic, the greater part of 
which were in common use about the time 
of the King James translation of the Bible. 
Shakspeare stands less in need of a glossary 
to most New Englanders than to many a na- 
tive of the Old Country. The peculiarities 
of our speech, however, are rapidly wearing 
out. As there is no country where reading 
is so universal and newspapers are so multi- 
tudinous, so no phrase remains long local, 
but is transplanted in the mail-bags to every 
remotest corner of the land. Consequently 
our dialect approaches nearer to uniformity 
than that of any other nation. 

The English have complained of us for 
coining new words. Many of those so stig- 



INTRODUCTION. 27 

niatlzed were old ones by them forgotten, 
and all make now an unquestioned part of 
the currency, wherever English is spoken. 
Undoubtedly, we have a right to make new 
words, as they are needed by the fresh as- 
pects under which life presents itself here 
in the New World ; and, indeed, wherever 
a language is alive, it grows. It might be 
questioned whether we could not establish a 
stronger title to the ownership of the Eng- 
lish tongue than the mother-islanders them- 
selves. Here, past all question, is to be its 
great home and centre. And not only is it 
already spoken here by greater numbers, but 
with a far higher popular average of correct- 
ness, than in Britain. The great writers of 
it, too, we might claim as ours, were owner- 
ship to be settled by the number of readers 
and lovers. 

As regards the provincialisms to be met 
with in this volume, I may say that the 
reader will not find one which is not (as I 
believe) either native or imported with the 
early settlers, nor one which I have not, with 
my own ears, heard in familiar use. In the 
metrical portion of the book, I have endeav- 
ored to adapt the spelling as nearly as pos- 
sible to the ordinary mode of pronunciation. 



2 8 INTROD UCTION. 

Let the reader wlio deems me over particular 
remember this caution of Martial : — 

" Quern recitas, mens est, Fidentine, libellus ; 
Sed male cum recitas, incipit esse tuus." 

A few further explanatory remarks will 
not be impertinent. 

I shall barely lay down a few general 
rules for the reader's guidance. 

1. The genuine Yankee never gives the 
rough sound to the r when he can help it, 
and often displays considerable ingenuity in 
avoiding it even before a vowel. 

2. He seldom sounds the final g^ a piece 
of self-denial, if we consider his partiality 
for nasals. The same of the final d, as han^ 
and Stan' for ha?id and stand, 

3. The h in such words as while, when, 
where, he omits altogether. 

4. In regard to a, he shows some inconsis- 
tency, sometimes giving a close and obscure 
sound, as hev for have, hendy for handy, ez 
for as, thet for that, and again giving it the 
broad sound it has iia. father, as hdnsome for 
handsome, 

5. To the sound on he prefixes an e (hard 
to exemplify otherwise than orally). 

The following passage in Shakspeare he 
would recite thus : - — 



INT ROD UC TION. 29 

" Neow is the winta uv eour discontent 

Med glorious summa by this sun o' Yock, 

An' all the cleouds thet leowered upun eour heouse 

In the deep buzzum o' the oshin buried ; 

Neow air eour breows beound 'ith victorious wreaths ; 

Eour breused arms hung up fer monimunce ; 

Eour starn alarums changed to merry meetins, 

Eour dreffle marches to delightful measures. 

Grim-visaged war heth smeuthed his wrinkled front, 

An' neow, instid o' mountin' barebid steeds 

To fright the souls o' ferfle edverseries. 

He capers nimly in a lady's chamber, 

To the lascivious pleasin' uv a loot." 

6. Au^ va such words as daughter and 
slaughter he pronounces ah. 

7. To the dish thus seasoned add a drawl 
ad libitum. 

[Mr. Wilbur's notes here become entirely frag- 
mentary. — C. N,] 

a. Unable to procure a likeness of Mr. 
Biglow, I thought the curious reader might 
be gratified with a sight of the editorial effi- 
gies. And here a choice between two was 
offered, — the one a profile (entirely black) 
cut by Doyle, the other a portrait painted 
by a native artist of much promise. The 
first of these seemed wanting in expression, 
and in the second a slight obliquity of the 
visual organs has been heightened (perhaps 



30 INTRODUCTION. 

from an over-desire of force on tlie part of 
the artist) into too close an approach to ac- 
tual strabismus. This slight divergence in 
my optical apparatus from the ordinary- 
model — however I may have been taught to 
regard it in the light of a mercy rather than 
a cross, since it enabled me to give as much 
of directness and personal application to my 
discourses as met the wants of my congrega- 
tion, without risk of offending any by being 
supposed to have him or her in my eye (as 
the saying is) — seeemed yet to Mrs. Wil- 
bur a sufficient objection to the engraving 
of the aforesaid painting. We read of many 
who either absolutely refused to allow the 
copying of their features, as especially did 
Plotinus and Agesilaus among the ancients, 
not to mention the more modern instances 
of Scioppius Palaeottus, Pinellus, Yelserus, 
Gataker, and others, or were indifferent 
thereto, as Cromwell. 

p. Yet was Caesar desirous of concealing 
his baldness. Per contra^ my Lord Protec- 
tor's carefulness in the matter of his wart 
might be cited. Men generally more de- 
sirous of being improved in their portraits 
than characters. Shall probably find very 



INTRODUCTION. 31 

unflattered likenesses of ourselves in Record- 
ing Angel's gallery. 

y. Whether any of our national peculiari- 
ties may be traced to our use of stoves, as a 
certain closeness of the lips in pronunciation, 
and a smothered smoulderingness of dispo- 
sition, seldom roused to open flame? An 
unrestrained intercourse with fire probably 
conducive to generosity and hospitality of 
soul. Ancient Mexicans used stoves, as the 
friar Augustin Ruiz reports, Hakluyt, III. 
468, — but Popish priests not always reli- 
able authority. 

To-day picked my Isabella grapes. Crop 
injured by attacks of rose-bug in the spring. 
Whether Noah was justifiable in preserving 
this class of insects ? 

8. Concerning Mr. Biglow's pedigree. 
Tolerably certain that there was never a 
poet among his ancestors. An ordination 
hymn attributed to a maternal uncle, but 
perhaps a sort of production not demanding 
the creative faculty. 

His grandfather a painter of the grandiose 
or Michael Angelo school. Seldom painted 
objects smaller than houses or barns, and 
these with uncommon expression. 



8 2 INTR OD UCTl ON. 

€. 0£ the Wilburs no complete pedigree. 
The crest said to be a wild hoar^ whence, 
perhaps, the name. (?) A connection with 
the Earls of Wilbraham Qquasi wild boar 
ham) might be made out. This suggestion 
worth following up. In 1677, John W. m. 

Expect , had issue, 1. John, 2. Hag- 

gai, 3. Expect, 4. Euhamah, 5. Desire. 

" Hear lyes y* bodye of Mrs Expect Wilber, 
Y* ere well salvages they kil'd her, 
Together w*^ other Christian soles eleaven, 
October y® ix daye, 1707. 
Y* stream of Jordan sh' as crost ore 
And now expeacts me on y* other shore : 
I live in hope her soon to join ; 
Her earthlye yeeres were forty and nine." 

From Gravestone in Pekussett, North Parish. 

This is unquestionably the same John who 
afterward (1711) married Tabitha Hagg or 
Eagg. 

But if this were the case, she seems to 
have died early ; for only three years after, 
namely, 1714, we have evidence that he 
married Winifred, daughter of Lieutenant 
Tipping. 

• He seems to have been a man of sub- 
stance, for we find him in 1696 conveying 
" one undivided eightieth part of a salt- 



INTRODUCTION. 33 

meadow " in Yabbok, and he commanded a 
sloop in 1702. 

Those who doubt the importance of gen- 
ealogical studies fuste potius quam argu- 
mento erudiendi. 

I trace him as far as 1723, and there lose 
him. In that year he was chosen selectman. 

No gravestone. Perhaps overthrown when 
new hearse-house was built, 1802. 

He was probably the son of John, who 
came from Bilham Comit. Salop, circa 1642. 

This first John was a man of considerable 
importance, being twice mentioned with the 
honorable prefix of Mr. in the town records. 
Name spelt with two Z-s. 

" Hear lyeth y® bod \_stone unhappily broken.'] 
Mr. Ihon Willber [Esq.] [/ inclose this in brack- 
ets as doubtful. To me it seems clear.] 
Ob't die [illegible; looks like xviii.'] . . . iii [prob. 
1693.] 

paynt 
deseased seinte : 
A friend and [fath]er untoe all y® opreast, 
Hee gave y** wicked familists uoe reast, 
When Sat[an bl]ewe his Antinomian blaste, 
Wee clong to [Willber as a steadf]ast maste. 
[A]gaynst y® horrid Qua[kers] . . . 

It is greatly to be lamented that this curi- 
ous epitaph is mutilated. It is said that the 



84 INTR OB UCTION. 

sacrilegious British soldiers made a target 
of this stone during the war of Independ- 
ence. How odious an animosity which 
pauses not at the grave ! How brutal that 
which spares not the monuments of authentic 
history! This is not improbably from the 
pen of Rev. Moody Pyram, who is men- 
tioned by Hubbard as having been noted 
for a silver vein of poetry. If his papers 
be still extant, a copy might possibly be 
recovered. 



NOTICES OF AN INDEPENDENT 
PRESS. 

[I HAVE observed, reader, (bene- or male-volent, 
as it may happen,) that it is customary to append to 
the second editions of books, and to the second works 
of authors, short sentences commendatory of the first, 
under the title of Notices of the Press. These, I have 
been given to understand, are procurable at certain 
established rates, payment being made either in 
money or advertising patronage by the publisher, or 
by an adequate outlay of servility on the part of the 
author. Considering these things with myself, and 
also that such notices are neither intended, nor gen- 
erally believed, to convey any real opinions, being a 
purely ceremonial accompaniment of literature, and 
resembling certificates to the various morbiferal pan- 
aceas, I conceived that it would be not only more 
economical to prepare a sufficient number of such 
myself, but also more immediately subservient to the 
end in view to prefix them to this our primary edition 
rather than await the contingency of a second, when 
they would seem to be of small utility. To delay 
attaching the bohs until the second attempt at flying 
the kite would indicate but a slender experience in 
that useful art. Neither has it escaped my notice, 
nor failed to afford me matter of reflection, tliat, 
when a circus or a caravan is about to visit Jaalam, 
the initial step is to send forward large and highly 



36 NOTICES OF AN 

ornamented bills of performance to be hung in the 
bar-room and the post-office. These having been suffi- 
ciently gazed at, and beginning to lose their attrac- 
tiveness except for the flies, and, truly, the boys also, 
(m whom I find it impossible to repress, even during 
school-hours, certain oral and telegraphic correspond- 
ences concerning the expected show,) upon some fine 
morning the band enters in a gayly-painted wagon, 
or triumphal chariot, and with noisy advertisement, 
by means of brass, wood, and sheepskin, makes the 
circuit of our startled village streets. Then, as the 
exciting sounds draw nearer and nearer, do I desid- 
erate those eyes of Aristarchus, " whose looks were 
as a breeching to a boy." Then do I perceive, with 
vain regret of wasted opportunities, the advantage of 
a pancratic or pantechnic education, since he is most 
reverenced by my little subjects who can throw the 
cleanest summerset or walk most securely upon the 
revolving cask. The story of the Pied Piper be- 
comes for the first time credible to me, (albeit con- 
firmed by the Hameliners dating their legal instru- 
ments from the period of his exit,) as I behold how 
those strains, without pretence of magical potency, 
bewitch the pupillary legs, nor leave to the pedagogic 
an entire self-control. For these reasons, lest my 
kingly prerogative should suffer diminution, I pro- 
rogue my restless commons, whom I also follow into 
the street, chiefly lest some mischief may chance be- 
fall them. After the manner of such a band, I send 
forward the following notices of domestic manufac- 
ture, to make brazen proclamation, not unconscious 
of the advantage wliich will accrue, if our little craft 
cymbula sutilis, shall seem to leave port with a clip- 



INDEPENDENT PRESS. 37 

ping breeze, and to carry, in nautical phrase, a bone 
in her mouth. Nevertheless, I have chosen, as being 
more equitable, to prepare some also sufficiently ob- 
jurgatory, that readers of every taste may find a dish 
to their palate. I have modelled them upon actually 
existing specimens, preserved in my own cabinet of 
natural curiosities. One, in particular, I had copied 
with tolerable exactness from a notice of one of my 
own discourses, which, from its superior tone and ap- 
pearance of vast experience, I concluded to have been 
written by a man at least three hundred years of 
age, though I recollected no existing instance of such 
antediluvian longevity. Nevertheless, I afterwards 
discovered the author to be a young gentleman pre- 
paring for the ministry under the direction of one of 
my brethren in a neighboring town, and whom I had 
once instinctively corrected in a Latin quantity. But 
this I have been forced to omit, from its too great 
length. — H.W.] 

From the Universal Littery Universe. 

Full of passages which rivet the attention of the reader. 
. . . Under a rustic garb, sentiments are conveyed which 
should be committed to the memory and engraven on the heart 
of every moral and social being. . . . We consider this a 
unique performance. . . . We hope to see it soon introduced 
into our common schools. . . . Mr. Wilbur has performed his 
duties as editor with excellent taste and judgment. . . . This 
is a vein which we hope to see successfully prosecuted. . . . 
We hail the appearance of this work as a long stride toward 
the formation of a purely aboriginal, indigenous, native, and 
American literature. We rejoice to meet with an author na- 
tional enough to break away from the slavish deference, too 
common among us, to English grammar and orthography. 



38 NOTICES OF AN 

. . . Where all is so good, we are at a loss how to make ex- 
tracts. . . . On the whole, we may call it a volume which no 
library, pretending to entire completeness, should fail to 
place upon its shelves. 



From the Higginhottomopolis Snapping-Turtle. 

A collection of the merest balderdash and doggerel that it 
was ever our bad fortune to lay eyes on. The author is a 
vulgar buffoon, and the editor a talkative, tedious old fool. 
We use strong language, but should any of our readers pe- 
ruse the book, (from which calamity Heaven preserve them!) 
they will find reasons for it thick as the leaves of Vallum- 
brozer, or, to use a still more expressive comparison, as the 
combined heads of author and editor. The work is wretch- 
edly got up. . . . We should like to know how much British 
gold was pocketed by this libeller of our country and her 
purest patriots. 

From the Oldfogrumville Mentor. 

We have not had time to do more than glance through this 
handsomely printed volume, but the name of its respectable 
editor, the Rev. Mr. Wilbur, of Jaalam, will afford a sufficient 
guaranty for the worth of its contents. . . . The paper is 
white, the type clear, and the volume of a convenient and at- 
tractive size. ... In reading this elegantly executed work, 
it has seemed to us that a passage or two might have been 
retrenched with advantage, and that the general stjde of dic- 
tion was susceptible of a higher polish. . . . On the whole, 
we may safely leave the ungrateful task of criticism to the 
reader. We will barely suggest, that in volumes intended, 
as this is, for the illustration of a provincial dialect and turns 
of expression, a dash of humor or satire might be thrown in 
with advantage. . . . The work is admirably got up. . . . 
This work will form an appropriate ornament to the centre- 
table. It is beautifully printed, on paper of an excellent 
quality. 



INDEPENDENT PRESS. 39 

From the Dekay Bulwark. 

"We should be wanting in our duty as the conductor of that 
tremendous engine, a public press, as an American, and as a 
man, did we allow such an opportunity as is presented to us 
by "The Biglow Papers" to pass by without entering our 
earnest protest against such attempts (now, alas ! too common) 
at demoralizing the public sentiment. Under a wretched mask 
of stupid drollery, slavery, war, the social glass, and, in short, 
all the valuable and time-honored institutions justly dear to 
our common humanity, and especially to republicans, are 
made the butt of coarse and senseless ribaldry by this low- 
minded scribbler. It is time that the respectable and religious 
portion of our community should be aroused to the alarming 
inroads of foreign Jacobinism, sansculottism, and infidelity. 
It is a fearful proof of the wide-spread nature of this con- 
tagion, that these secret stabs at religion and virtue are given 
from under the cloak {credite, posteri !) of a clergyman. It 
is a mournful spectacle indeed to the patriot and Christian to 
see liberality and new ideas (falsely so called, — they are as 
old as Eden) invading the sacred precincts of the pulpit. . . . 
On the whole, we consider this volume as one of the first 
shocking results which we predicted would spring out of the 
late French " Revolution " ( ! ) 

From the Bungtown Copper and Comprehensive Tocsin (a 
try weakly family journal). 

Altogether an admirable work. . . . Full of humor, boister- 
ous, but delicate, — of wit withering and scorching, yet com- 
bined with a pathos cool as morning dew, — of satire pon- 
derous as the mace of Richard, yet keen as the scymitar of 
Saladin. . . . A work full of "mountain-mirth," mischievous 
as Puck and lightsome as Ariel. . . . We know not whether 
to admire most the genial, fresh, and discursive concinnity of 
the author, or his playful fancy, weird imagination, and com- 
pass of style, at once both objective and subjective. . . . We 
might indulge in some criticisms, but, were the author other 
than he is, he would be a different being. As it is, he has a 



40 NOTICES OF AN 

wonderful pose, which flits from flower to flower, and bears 
the reader irresistibly along on its eagle pinions (like Gany- 
mede) to the "highest heaven of invention." . . . We love a 
book so purely objective. . . . Many of his pictures of natural 
scenery have an extraordinary subjective clearness and fidel- 
ity. ... In fine, we consider this as one of the most extraor- 
dinary volumes of this or any age. We know of no English 
author who could have written it. It is a work to which the 
proud genius of our country, standing with one foot on the 
Aroostook and the other on the Eio Grande, and holding up 
the star-spangled banner amid the wreck of matter and the 
crush of worlds, may point with bewildering scorn of the 
punier efforts of enslaved Europe. . . . We hope soon to en- 
counter our author among those higher walks of literature in 
which he is evidently capable of achieving enduring fame. 
Already we should be inclined to assign him a high position 
in the bright galaxy of our American bards. 

From the Saltriver Pilot and Flag of Freedom. 

A volume in bad grammar and worse taste. . . . While the 
pieces here collected were confined to their appropriate sphere 
in the corners of obscure newspapers, we considered them 
wholly beneath contempt, but, as the author has chosen to 
come forward in this public manner, he must expect the lash 
he so richly merits. . . . Contemptible slanders. . . . Vilest 
Billingsgate. . . . Has raked all the gutters of our language. 
. . . The most pure, upright, and consistent politicians not 
safe from his malignant venom. . . . General Gushing comes 
in for a share of his vile calumnies. . . . The Reverend Ho- 
mer Wilbur is a disgi-ace to his cloth. . . . 

From the World-Earmonic-jEolian-Attachment. 

Speech is silver : silence is golden. No utterance more Orphic 
than this. While, therefore, as highest author, we reverence 
him whose works continue heroically unwritten, we have also 
our hopeful word for those who with pen (from wing of goose 
loud-cackling, or seraph God-commissioned) record the thing 



INDEPENDENT PRESS. 41 

that is revealed. . . . Under mask of quaintest irony, we de- 
tect here the deep, storm-tost (nigh shipwracked) soul, thun- 
der-scarred, semarticulate, but ever climbing hopefully toward 
the peaceful summits of an Infinite Sorrow. . . . Yes, thou 
poor, forlorn Hosea, with Hebrew (ire-flaming soul in thee, for 
thee also this life of ours has not been without its aspects of 
heavenliest pity and laughingest mirth. Conceivable enough ! 
Through coarse Thersites-cloak, we have revelation of the 
heart, wild-glowing, world-clasping, that is in him. Bravely 
he grapples with the life-problem as it presents itself to him, 
uncombed, shaggy, careless of the "nicer proprieties," inex- 
pert of "elegant diction," yet with voice audible enough to 
whoso hath ears, up there on the gravelly side-hills, or down 
on the splashy, Indiarubber-like salt-marshes of native Jaalam. 
To this soul also the Necessity of Creating somewhat has un- 
veiled its awful front. If not (Edipuses and Electras and 
Alcestises, then in God's name Birdofredum Sawins ! These 
also shall get born into the world, and filch (if so need) a Zin- 
gali subsistence therein, these lank, omnivorous Yankees of 
his. He shall paint the Seen, since the Unseen will not sit 
to him. Yet in him also are Nibelungen-lays, and Iliads, and 
Ulysses-wanderings, and Divine Comedies, — if only once he 
could come at them! Therein lies much, nay all; for what 
truly is this which we name All, but that which we do not 
possess ? . . . Glimpses also are given us of an old father 
Ezekiel, not without paternal pride, as is the wont of such. 
A brown, parchment-hided old man of the geoponic or bucolic 
species, gray-eyed, we fancy, queued perhaps, with much 
weather-cunning and plentiful September-gale memories, 
bidding fair in good time to become the Oldest Inhabitant. 
After such hasty apparition, he vanishes and is seen no more. 
... Of "Rev. Homer Wilbur, A. M., Pastor of the First 
Church in Jaalam," we have small care to speak here. Spare 
touch in him of his Melesigenes namesake, save, haply, the 
— blindness ! A tolerably caliginose, nephelegeretous elderly 
gentleman, with infinite faculty of sermonizing, muscularized 
by long practice, and excellent digestive apparatus, and, 
for the rest, well-meaning enough, and with small private il- 
luminations (somewhat tallowy, it is to be feared) of his own. 



42 NOTICES OF AN 

To him, there, "Pastor of the First Church in Jaalam," our 
Hosea presents himself as a quite inexplicable Sphinx-riddle. 
A rich poverty of Latin and Greek, — so far is clear enough, 
even to eyes peering myopic through horn-lensed editorial 
spectacles, — but naught farther ? O purblind, well-meaning, 
altogether fuscous Melesigenes- Wilbur, there are things in 
him incommunicable by stroke of birch ! Did it ever enter 
that old bewildered head of thine that there was the Possibil- 
ity of the Infinite in him? To thee, quite wingless (and even 
featherless) biped, has not so much even as a dream of wings 
ever come? "Talented young parishioner" ? Among the 
Arts whereof thou art Magister, does that of seeing happen 
to be one ? Unhappy Artium Magister ! Somehow a Ne- 
mean lion, fulvous, torrid-ej-ed, dry-nursed in broad-howling 
sand-wildernesses of a sufficiently rare spirit-Libya (it may 
be supposed) has got whelped among the sheep. Already he 
stands wild-glaring, with feet clutching the ground as with 
oak-roots, gathering for a Remus-spring over the walls of thy 
little fold. In Heaven's name, go not near him with that fly- 
bite crook of thine 1 In good time, thou painful preacher, 
thou wilt go to the appointed place of departed Artillery-Elec- 
tion Sermons, Right-Hands of Fellowship, and Results of 
Councils, gathered to thy spiritual fathers with much Latin 
of the Epitaphial sort ; thou, too, shalt have th}-- reward ; but 
on him the Eumenides have looked, not Xantippes of the pit, 
snake-tressed, tinger-threatening, but radiantly calm as on 
antique gems; for him paws impatient the winged courser of 
the gods, champing unwelcome bit; him the starry deeps, the 
emp3^rean glooms, and far-flashing splendors await. 

From the Onion Grove Phcenix. 

A talented young townsman of ours, recently returned from 
a Continental tour, and who is already favorably known to 
our readers by his sprightly letters from abroad which have 
graced our columns, called at our office yesterday. We learn 
from him, that, having enjoyed the distinguished privilege, 
while in Germany, of an introduction to the celebrated Von 
Humbug, he took the opportunity to present that eminent 
man with a copy of the " Biglow Papers.'* The next morn- 



INDEPENDENT PRESS. 43 

ing he received the following note, which he has kindly fur- 
nished us for publication. We prefer to print verbatim, know- 
ing that our readers will readily forgive the few errors into 
which the illustrious writer has fallen, through ignorance of 
our language. 
"High-Worthy Mister! 

"I shall also now especially happy starve, because I have 
more or less a work of one those aboriginal Red Men seen in 
which have I so deaf an interest ever taken full-worthy on the 
self shelf with our Gottsched to be upset. 

"Pardon my in the English-speech unpractice! 

"Von Humbug." 

He also sent with the above note a copy of his famous work 
on "Cosmetics," to be presented to Mr. Biglow ; but this was 
taken from our friend by the English custom-house officers, 
probably through a petty national spite. No doubt, it has 
by this time found its way into the British Museum. We 
"trust this outrage will be exposed in all our American papers. 
We shall do our best to bring it to the notice of the State De- 
partment. Our numerous readers will share in the pleasure 
we experience at seeing our young and vigorous national 
literature thus encouragingly patted on the head by this ven- 
erable and world-renowned German. We love to see these 
reciprocations of good-feeling between the different branches 
of the great Anglo-Saxon race. 

[The following genuine " notice " having met my 
eye, I gladly insert a portion of it here, the more es- 
pecially as it contains a portion of one of Mr. Big- 
low's poems not elsewhere printed. — H. W.] 

From the Jaalam Independent Blunderbuss. 

. . . But, while we lament to see our young townsman thus 
mingling in the heated contests of party politics, we think we 
detect in him the presence of talents which, if properly di- 
rected, might give an innocent pleasure to many. As a proof 
that he is competent to the production of other kinda of poe- 



44 NOTICES OF AN INDEPENDENT PRESS. 

try, -we copy for our readers a short fragment of a pastoral by 
him, the manuscript of which was loaned us by a friend. 
The title of it is " The Courtin'. " 

Zekle crep' up, quite unbeknown, 

An' peeked in thru the winder, 
An' there sot Huldy all alone, 

'ith no one nigh to hender. 

Agin' the chimbly crooknecks hung, 

An' in amongst 'em rusted 
The ole queen's arm thet gran'ther Young 

Fetched back from Concord busted. 

The wannut logs shot sparkles out 

Towards the pootiest, bless her ! 
An' leetle fires danced all about 

The chiny on the dresser. 

The very room, coz she wuz in. 
Looked warm from floor to ceilin', 

An' she looked full ez rosy agin 
Ez th' apples she wuz peelin'. 

She heerd a foot an' knowed it, tu, 

Araspin' on the scraper, — 
All ways to once her feelins flew 

Like sparks in burnt-up paper. 

He kin' o' I'itered on the mat, 

Some doubtfle o' the seekle ; 
His heart kep' goin' pitypat, 

But hern went pit}'- Zekle. 



Satis multis sese emptores futures libri 
professis, Georgius Nichols, Cantabrigiensis, 
opus emittet de parte gravi sed adhuc neg- 
lecta historiae naturalis, cum titulo sequent!, 
videlicet : 

Conatus ad Delineationem naturalem non- 
nihil perfectlorem Scarahcel Bomhilatoris^ 
vulgo dicti Humbug, ab Homero Wilbur, 
Artium Magistro, Societatis liistorico-natura- 
lis Jaalamensis Prseside (Secretario, Socio- 
que (eheu !) singulo,) multarumque aliarum 
Societatum eruditarum (sive ineruditarum) 
t^m domesticarum quam transmarinarum So- 
cio — f orsitan f uturo. 

PROEMIUM. 

Lectori Benevolo S. 

Toga scbolastica nondum deposita, quum 
systemata varia entomologica, a viris ejus 
scientiae cultoribus studiosissimis summa dili- 
gentia sedificata, penitus indagassem, non 
fuit quin luctuose omnibus in iis, quamvis 
aliter laude dignissimis, hiatum magni mo- 



46 PROEMIUM. 

menti pereiperem. Tunc, nescio quo motu 
super lore impulsus, aut qua captus duicedine 
operis, ad eum implendum (Curtius alter) 
me solemniter devovi. Nee ab isto labore, 
SaLfxovLoj? imposito, abstinui antequam tracta- 
tulum sufficienter inconcinnum lingua verna- 
cula perfeceram. Inde, juveniliter tume- 
f actus, et barathro ineptise rwv /Si/SXtoTrwXihv 
(necnon " Public! Legentis ") nusquam ex- 
plorato, me composuisse quod quasi placen- 
tas prsefervidas (ut sic dicam) homines in- 
gurgitarent credidi. Sed, quum huic et alii 
bibliopolse MSS. mea submisissem et nihil 
solidius responsione valde negativa in Mu- 
sseum meum retulissem, horror ingens atque 
misericordia, ob crassitudinem Lambertia- 
nam in cerebris homunculorum istius muneris 
coelesti quadam ira infixam, me invasere. 
Extemplo mei solius impensis librum edere 
decrevi, nihil omnino dubitans quin " Mun- 
dus Scientificus " (ut aiunt) crumenam meam 
ampliter repleret. NuUam, attamen, ex agro 
illo meo parvulo segetem demessui, prseter 
gaudium vacuum bene de Republica merendi. 
Iste panis mens pretiosus super aquas lite- 
rarias fseculentas prsefidenter j actus, quasi 
Harpyiarum quarundam (scilicet bibliopola- 
rum istorum facinorosorum supradictorum) 



PROEM I UM. 4 A 

tactu rancidus, intra perpaucos dies mihi do. 
mum rediit. Et, quum ipse tali victu al, 
noil tolerarem, primum in mentem venit pis- 
tori (typographo nempe) nihilominus solven- 
dum esse. Animum non idcirco demisi, imo 
seque ac pueri naviculas suas penes se lino 
retinent (eo ut e recto cursu delapsas ad 
ripam retrahant), sic ego Arg3 meam char- 
taceam fluctibus laborantem a quaesitu vel- 
leris aurei, ipse potius tonsus pelleque exu- 
tus, mente solida revocavi. Metaphoram ut 
mutem, boomarangam meam a scopo aber- 
rantem retraxi, dum majore vi, occasione 
ministrante, ad versus Fortunam intorque- 
rem. Ast mihi, talia volventi, et, sicut Sa- 
turnus ille 7rat8o/5opos, liberos intellectus mei 
depascere fidenti, casus miserandus, nee an- 
tea inauditus, super venit. Nam, ut ferunt 
Scythas pietatis causa et parsimonise, pa- 
rentes suos mortuos devorasse, sic iilius hie 
mens primogenitus, Scythis ipsis minus man- 
suetus, patrem vivum totum et calcitrantem 
exsorbere enixus est. Nee tamen hac de 
causa sobolem meam esurientem exheredavi. 
Sed famem istam pro valido testimonio viri- 
litatis roborisque potius habui, cibumque ad 
eam satiandam salva paterna mea carne, 
petii. Et quia bilem illam scaturientem ad 



48 PROEMIUM. 

laes etiam concoquendum idoneam esse esti- 
anabam, unde ses alienum, ut minoris pretii, 
'haberem, circumspexi. Rebus ita se baben- 
tibus, ab avunculo meo Johanne Doolittle, 
Armigero, impetravi ut pecunias necessarias 
suppeditaret, ne opus esset mihi universita- 
tem relinquendi antequam ad gradum pri- 
mum in artibus pervenissem. Tunc ego, sal- 
vum facere patronum meum munificum 
maxime cupiens, omnes libros primse edi- 
tionis operis mei non venditos una cum pri- 
vilegio in omne sevum ejusdem imprimendi 
et edendi avunculo meo dicto pigneravi. Ex 
illo die, atro lapide notando, curse vocifer- 
antes familise singulis annis crescentis eo us- 
que insultabant ut nunquam tam carum pig- 
nus e vinculis istis aheneis solvere possem. 

Avunculo vero nuper mortuo, quum inter 
alios consanguineos testamenti ejus lectio- 
nem audiendi causa advenissem, erectis auri- 
bus verba talia sequentia accepi : " Quoniam 
persuasum habeo meum dilectum nepotem 
Homerum, longa et intima rerum angusta- 
rum domi experientia, aptissimum esse qui 
divitias tueatur, beneficenterque ac prudenter 
lis divinis creditis utatur, — ergo, motus bisce 
cogitationibus, exque amore meo in ilium 
magno, do, legoque nepoti caro meo supra- 



PROEMIUM. 49 

nominato omnes singiilaresqiie istas posses- 
siones nee ponclerabiles nee eomputabiles 
meas quae sequuntur, seilieet : quingentos 
libros quos milii pigneravit dietus Homerus, 
anno lucis 1792, eum privilegio edendi et re- 
petendi opus istud ' scientifieum ' (quod di- 
cunt) suum, si sic elegerit. Tamen D. O. M. 
preeor oeulos Homeri nepotis mei ita aperiat 
eumque moveat, ut libros istos in bibliotlieca 
unius e plurimis eastellis suis Hispaniensibus 
tuto abscondat.'* 

His verbis (vix credibilibus) auditis, cor 
meum in pectore exsultavit. Deinde, quo- 
niam tractatus Anglice scriptus spem auc- 
toris fefellerat, quippe quum studium His- 
toriae Naturalis in Republica nostra inter 
factionis strepitum languescat, Latine ver- 
sum edere statui, et eo potius quia nescio 
quomodo disciplina acadeniica et duo diplo- 
mata proficiant, nisi quod peritos linguaruni 
omnino mortuarum (et damnandarum, ut 
dicebat iste iravovpyo^ Gulielmus Cobbett) 
nos faciant. 

Et mihi adhuc superstes est tota ilia editio 
prima, quam quasi crepitaculum per quod 
dentes caninos dentibam retineo. 



OPERIS SPECIMEN. 

(^Ad exemplum Johannis Physiophili speciminis Mona- 
chologice.) 

12. S. B. Militaris, Wilbur. Carnifex, Jablonsk. 
Pro/anus, Desfont. 

[Male hancce speciem Cyclop em Fabricius 
vocat, ut qui singulo oculo ad quod sui inter- 
est distinguitur. Melius vero Isaacus Outis 
nullum inter S. milit. S. que Belzebul (Fa- 
bric. 152) discrimen esse defendit.] 

Habitat civitat. Americ. austral. 

Aureis lineis splendidus ; plerumque tamen 
sordidus, utpote lanienas valde frequentans, 
fcetore sanguinis allectus. Amat quoque in- 
super septa apricari, neque inde, nisi maxima 
conatione, detruditur. Candidatus ergo po- 
pulariter vocatus. Caput cristam quasi pen- 
narum ostendit. Pro cibo vaccam publicam 
callide mulget ; abdomen enorme ; facultas 
suctus baud facile estimanda. Otiosus, fatu- 
us ; ferox nibilominus, semperque dimicare 
paratus. Tortuose repit. 

Capite ssepe maxima cum cura dissecto, 
ne illud rudimentum etiam cerebri commune 
omnibus prope insectis detegere poteram. 

Unam de hoc S. milit. rem singularem no- 



OPERIS SPECIMEN. 51 

tavi ; nam S. Guineens. (Fabric. 143) servos 
facit, et idcirco a multis summa in reveren- 
tia habitus, quasi scintillas rationis paene hu- 
manse demonstrans. 

24. S. B. Criticus, Wilbur. Zoilus, Fabric. Pyg- 
mceus, Carlsen. 

[Stultissime Johannes Stryx cum S. punc- 
tato (Fabric. 64-109) confundit. Specimina 
quamplurima scrutationi microscopicse sub- 
jeci, nunquam tamen unum ulla indicia 
puncti cujusvis prorsus ostendentem inveni.] 

Praecipue formidolosus, insectatusque, in 
proxima rima anonyma sese abscondit, ive^ 
we^ creberrime stridens. Ineptus, segnipes. 

Habitat ubique gentium ; in sicco ; nidum 
suum terebratione indefessa sedificans. Gi- 
bus. Libros depascit ; sicoss praecipue seli- 
gens, et forte succidum. 



THE BIGLOW PAPEES. 

No. I. 
A LETTER 

FROM MR. EZEKIEL BIGLOW OF JAALAM TO THE 

HON. JOSEPH T. BUCKINGHAM, EDITOR OF THE 

BOSTON COURIER, INCLOSING A POEM OF HIS 

SON, MR. HOSEA BIGLOW. 

Jaylem, June, 1846. 

Mister Edbyter : — Our Hosea wuz 
down to Boston last week, and he see a crue- 
tin Sarjunt a struttin round as popler as a 
hen with 1 chicking, with 2 fellers a drum- 
min and fifin arter him like all nater. the 
sarjunt he thout Hosea hed n't gut his i teeth 
cut cos he looked a kindo 's though he 'd jest 
com down, so he cal'lated to hook him in, 
but Hosy wood n't take none o' his sarse 
for all he hed much as 20 Rooster's tales 
stuck onto his hat and eenamost enuf brass 
a bobbin up and down on his shoulders and 
figureed onto his coat and trousis, let alone 
wut nater hed sot in his featers, to make a 
6 pounder out on. 



TUE BIGLOW PAPERS. 53 

wal, Hosea he com home consklerabal 
riled, and arter I 'd gone to bed I heern Him 
a thrashin round like a short-tailed Bull in 
fli-time. The old Woman ses she to me ses 
she, Zekle, ses she, our Hosee's gut the chol- 
lery or suthin anuther ses she, don't you Bee 
sheered, ses I, he 's oney amakin pottery ^ 
ses i, he 's oilers on hand at that ere busynes 
like Da & martin, and shure enuf, cum morn- 
in, Hosy he cum down stares full chizzle, hare 
on eend and cote tales flyin, and sot rite of to 
go reed his varses to Parson Wilbur bein he 
haint aney grate shows o' book larnin him- 
self, bmieby he cum back and,sed the par- 
son wuz dreffle tickled with 'em as i hoop 
you will Be, and said they wuz True grit. 

Hosea ses taint hardly fair to call 'em hisn 
now, cos the parson kind o' slicked off sum 
o' the last varses, but he told Hosee he did 
n't want to put his ore in to tetch to the 
Kest on 'em, bein they wuz verry well As 
thay wuz, and then Hosy ses he sed suthin 
a nuther about Simplex Mundishes or sum 
sech feller, but I guess Hosea kind o' did n't 
hear him, for I never hearn o' nobody o' 
that name in this villadge, and I 've lived 
here man and boy 76 year cum next tater 

1 Aut insanity aut versos facit. — H. W. 



64 THE BIGLOW PAPERS. 

diggin, and thair aint no wheres a kitting 
spryer 'n I be. 

If you print 'em I wish you 'd jest let folks 
know who hosy's father is, cos my ant Ke- 
ziah used to say it 's nater to be curus ses 
she, she aint livin though and he 's a likely 
kind o' lad. 

EZEKIEL BIGLOW. 



Thrash away, you '11 hev to rattle 

On them kittle drums o' yourn, — 
'T aint a knowin' kind o' cattle 

Thet is ketched with mouldy corn ; 
Put in stiff, you fifer feller, 

Let folks see how spry you be, — 
Guess you 11 toot tiU you are yeUer 

'Fore you git ahold o' me ! 

Thet air flag 's a leetle rotten, 

Hope it aint your Sunday's best ; — 
Fact ! it takes a sight o' cotton 

To stuff out a soger's chest : 
Sence we farmers hev to pay fer 't, 

Ef you must wear humps Hke these, 
Sposin' you should try salt hay fer 't, 

It would du ez slick ez grease. 

'T would n't suit them Southun feUers, 
They 're a dreffle graspin' set, 



THE BIGLOW PAPERS. 55 

We must oilers blow the bellers 
Wen they want their irons het ; 

May be it 's all right ez preachin', 
But my narves it kind o' grates, 

Wen I see the overreachin' 
O' them nigger-drivin' States. 

Them thet rule us, them slave-traders, 

Haint they cut a thunderin' swarth, 
(Helped by Yankee renegaders,) 

Thru the vartu o' the North ! 
We begin to think it 's nater 

To take sarse an' not be riled ; — 
Who 'd expect to see a tater 

All on eend at bein' biled ? 

Ez fer war, I call it murder, — 

There you hev it plain an* flat ; 
I don't want to go no furder 

Than my Testyment fer that ; 
God hez sed so plump an' fairly, 

It 's ez long ez it is broad, 
An' you 've gut to git up airly 

Ef you want to take in God. 

'Taint your eppyletts an' feathers 
Make the thing a grain more right ; 

'Taint afollerin' yoiu- bell-wethers 
Will excuse ye in His sight ; 

Ef you take a sword an' dror it, 
An' go stick a feller thru. 



56 THE BIGLOW PAPERS. 

Guv'ment aint to answer for it, 
God '11 send the bill to you. 

Wut 's the use o' meetin-goin' 

Every Sabbath, wet or dry, 
Ef it 's right to go amowin' 

Feller-men like oats an' rye ? 
I dunno but wut it 's pooty 

Trainin' round in bobtail coats, — 
But it 's curus Christian dooty 

This ere cuttin' folks's throats. 

They may talk o' Freedom's airy 

Tell they 're pupple in the face, — 
It 's a grand gret cemetary 

Fer the barthrights of our race ; 
They jest want this CaHforny 

So 's to lug new slave-states in 
To abuse ye, an' to scorn ye, 

And to plunder ye Hke sin. 

Aint it cute to see a Yankee 

Take sech everlastin' pains 
All to git the Devil's thankee, 

Helpin' on 'em weld their chains ? 
Wy, it 's jest ez clear ez figgers, 

Clear ez one an' one make two. 
Chaps thet make black slaves o' niggers 

Want to make wite slaves o' you. 



THE B I GLOW PAPERS. 67 

Tell ye jest the eencl I 've come to 

Arter cipherin' plaguy smart, 
An' it makes a handy sum, tu, 

Any gump could larn by heart; 
Laborin' man an' laborin' woman 

Hev one glory an' one shame, 
Ev'y thin' thet 's done inhuman 

Injers all on 'em the same. 

*Taint by turnin' out to hack folks 

You 're agoin' to git your right, 
Nor by lookin' down on black folks 

Coz you 're put upon by wite ; 
Slavery aint o' nary color, 

'Taint the hide thet makes it wus, 
All it keers fer in a feller 

'S jest to make him fill its pus. 

Want to tackle vie in, du ye ? 

I expect you '11 hev to wait ; 
Wen cold led puts daylight thru ye 

You '11 begin to kal'late ; 
S'pose the crows wun't fall to pickin' 

All the carkiss from your bones, 
Coz you helped to give a lickin' 

To them poor half-Spanish drones ? 

Jest go home an' ask our Nancy 

Wether I 'd be secli a goose 
Ez to jine ye, — guess you 'd fancy 

The etarnal bung wuz loose ! 



68 THE BIGLOW PAPERS. 

She wants me fer home consmnption, 
Let alone the hay 's to mow, — 

Ef you 're arter folks o' gumption, 
You 've a darned long row to hoe. 

Take them editors thet 's crowin' 

Like a cockerel three months old, — 
Don't ketch any on 'em goin', 

Though they he so blasted bold ; 
Aint they a prime set o' fellers ? 

'Fore they think on 't they wiU sprout, 
(Like a peach that' s got the yellers,) 

With the meanness bustin' out. 

Wal, go 'long to help 'em stealin' 

Bigger pens to cram with slaves, 
Help the men that 's oilers dealin' 

Insults on your fathers' graves ; 
Help the strong to grind the feeble, 

Help the many agin the few, 
Help the men thet call your people 

Witewashed slaves an' peddlin' crew ! 

Massachusetts, God forgive her. 

She 's akneelin' with the rest. 
She, thet ough' to ha' clung fer ever 

In her grand old eagle-nest ; 
She thet ough' to stand so fearless 

Wile the wracks are round her hurled, 
Holdin' up a beacon peerless 

To the oppressed of all the world ! 



THE BIG LOW PAPETtS. 59 

Haint they sold your colored seamen ? 

Haint they made your env'ys wiz ? 
Wut '11 make ye act like freemen? 

Wut '11 git your dander riz ? 
Come, I '11 tell ye wut I 'm thinkin* 

Is our dooty in this fix, 
They 'd ha' done 't ez quick ez winkin' 

In the days o' seventy-six. 

Clang the bells in every steeple, 

Call all true men to disown 
The tradoocers of our people. 

The enslavers o' their own ; 
Let our dear old Bay State proudly 

Put the trumpet to her mouth, 
Let her ring this messidge loudly 

In the ears of all the South : — 

" I '11 return ye good f er evil 

Much ez we frail mortils can, 
But I wun't go help the Devil 

Makin' man the cus o' man ; 
Call me coward, call me traiter, 

Jest ez suits your mean idees, — 
Here I stand a tyrant-hater, 

An' the friend o' God an' Peace ! " 

Ef I 'd my way I hed ruther 

We should go to work an' part, — 

They take one way, we take t'other, — 
Guess it would n't break my heart ; 



60 THE BIGLOW PAPERS. 

Man hed oiigh' to put asunder 

Them thet God has noways jined, 

An' I should n't gretly wonder 
Ef there 's thousands o' my mind. 

[The first recruiting sergeant on record I conceive 
to have heen that individual who is mentioned in the 
Book of Joh as going to and fro in the earth, and walk- 
ing up and doion in it. Bishop Latimer will have 
him to have heen a hishop, but to me that other call- 
ing would appear more congenial. The sect of Cain- 
ites is not yet extiuct, who esteemed the first-horn of 
Adam to be the most worthy, not only because of 
that privilege of primogeniture, but inasmuch as he 
was able to overcome and slay his younger brother. 
That was a wise saying of the famous Marquis 
Pescara to the Papal Legate, that it was impossible 
for men to serve Mars and Christ at the same time. 
Yet in time past the profession of arms was judged 
to be KOT* i^oxhv that of a gentleman, nor does this 
opinion want for strenuous upholders even in our 
day. Must we suppose, then, that the profession of 
Christianity was only intended for losels, or, at best, 
to afford an opening for plebeian ambition ? Or 
shall we hold with that nicely metaphysical Pomera- 
nian, Captain Vratz, who was Count Konigsmark's 
chief instrument in the murder of Mr. Thymic, that 
the Scheme of Salvation has been arranged with an 
especial eye to the necessities of the upper classes, 
and that " God would consider a gentleman and deal 
with him suitably to the condition and profession he 
had placed him in " ? It may be said of us all, Ex- 
emplo plus quam ratione vivimus. — H. W.] 



NO. II. 
A LETTER 

FROM MR. HOSEA BIGLOW TO THE HOX. J. T. BUCK- 
INGHAM, EDITOR OF THE BOSTON COURIER, COV- 
ERING A LETTER FROM MR. B. SAWIN, PRIVATE 
IN THE MASSACHUSETTS REGIMENT. 

[This letter of Mr. Sawin's was not originally 
■written in verse. Mr. Biglow, thinking it peculiarly- 
susceptible of metrical adornment, translated it, so 
to speak, into liis own vernacular tongue. This is 
not the time to consider the question, whether rhyme 
be a mode of expression natural to the human race. 
If leisure from other and more important avocations 
be granted, I will handle the matter more at large 
in an appendix to the present volume. In this place 
I will barely remark, that I have sometimes noticed 
in the unlanguaged prattlings of infants a fondness 
for alliteration, assonance, and even rhjTiie, in which 
natural predisposition we may trace the three de- 
grees through which our Anglo-Saxon verse rose to 
its culmination in the poetry of Pope. I would not 
be understood as questioning in these remarks that 
pious theory wliich supposes that children, if left 
entirely to themselves, would naturally discourse 
in Hebrew. For this the authority of one experi- 
ment is claimed, and I could, with Sir Thomas 



62 THE B I GLOW PAPERS. 

Browne, desire its establishment, inasmuch as the 
acquirement of that sacred tongue would thereby be 
facilitated. I am aware that Herodotus states the 
conclusion of Psammeticus to have been in favor of 
a dialect of the Phrygian. But, beside the chance 
that a trial of this importance would hardly be 
blessed to a Pagan monarch whose only motive was 
curiosity, we have on the Hebrew side the compara- 
tively recent investigation of James the Fourth of 
Scotland. I will add to this prefatory remark, that 
Mr. Sawin, though a native of Jaalam, has never 
been a stated attendant on the religious exercises of 
my congregation. I consider my humble efforts 
prospered in that not one of my sheep hath ever in- 
dued the wolf's clothing of war, save for the com- 
paratively innocent diversion of a militia training. 
Not that my flock are backward to undergo the hard- 
ships of defensive warfare. They serve cheerfully in 
the great army which fights even unto death joro aris 
et focis, accoutred with the spade, the axe, the plane, 
the sledge, the spelling-book, and other such effectual 
weapons against want and ignorance and unthrift. 
I have taught them (under God) to esteem our hu- 
man institutions as but tents of a night, to be stricken 
whenever Truth puts the bugle to her lips and sounds 
a march to the heights of wider-viewed intelligence 
and more perfect organization. — H. W.] 

Mister Buckinum, the follerin Billet 
was writ hum by a Yung feller of our town 
that wuz cussed fool enuff to goe atrottin 
inter Miss Chiff arter a Drum and fife, it 



THE B I GLOW PAPERS. 63 

ain't Nater for a feller to let on that he 's 
sick o' any bizness that He went intu off his 
own free will and a Cord, but I rather cal'- 
late he 's middlin tired o' voluntearin By this 
Time. I bleeve u may put dependunts on 
his statemence. For I never heered nothin 
bad on him let Alone his havin what Parson 
Wilbur cals a pongshong for cocktales, and 
he ses it wuz a soshiashun of idees sot him 
agoin arter the Crootin Sargient cos he wore 
a cocktale onto his hat. 

his Folks gin the letter to me and i shew 
it to parson Wilbur and he ses it oughter 
Bee printed, send It to mister Buckinum, 
ses he, i don't oilers agree with him, ses he, 
but by Time,^ ses he, I du like a feller that 
ain't a Feared. 

I have intusspussed a Few refleckshuns 
hear and thair. We 're kind o' prest with 
Hayin. 

Ewers respecfly 

HOSEA BIGLOW. 

1 In relation to this expression, I cannot but think that 
Mr. Biglow has been too hasty in attributing it to me. 
Though Time be a comparatively innocent personage to 
swear by, and though Longinus in his discourse Ilepl ' Yi//ovs 
has commended timely oaths as not only a useful but sub- 
lime figure of speech, yet I have always kept my lips free 
from that abomination. Odi profanum vulgus, I hate your 
swearing and hectoring fellows. — H. W. 



64 THE BIGLOW PAPERS. 

This kind o' sogerin' aint a mite like our Oc- 
tober trainin', 
A chap could clear right out from there ef 't only- 
looked like rainin'. 
An' th' Cunnles, tu, could kiver up their shap- 

poes with bandanners, 
An' send the insines skootin' to the bar-room with 

their banners, 
(Fear o' gittin' on 'em spotted,) an' a feller could 

cry quarter 
Ef he fired away his ramrod arter tu much rum 

an' water. 
Recollect wut fun we hed, you 'n I an' Ezry 

HoUis, 
Up there to Waltham plain last fall, ahavin' the 

CornwaUis ? ^ 
This sort o' thing aint jest like thet, — I wish 

thet I wuz furder, — ^ 
Nimepunce a day fer killin' folks comes kind o' 

low fer murder, 
(Wy I 've worked out to slarterin' some fer 

Deacon Cephas Billins, 
An' in the hardest times there wuz I oilers tetched 

ten shillins,) 
There 's sutthin' gits into my throat thet makes 

it hard to swaller, 
It comes so nateral to think about a hempen 

collar ; 

1 i hait the Site of a feller with a muskit as I du pizn But 
their is fun to a cornwallis I aint agoin' to deny it. — H. B. 

2 he means Not quite so fur i guess. — H. B. 



THE B I GLOW PAPERS. 65 

It 's glory, — but, in spite o' all my tryin' to git 

callous, 
I feel a kind o' in a cart, aridin' to the gallus. 
But wen it comes to bein' killed, — I tell ye I . 

felt streaked 
The fust time ever I found out wy baggonets wuz 

peaked ; 
Here 's how it wuz : I started out to go to a fan- 
dango, 
The sentinul he ups an' sez, " That 's furder 'an 

you can go." 
" None o' your sarse," sez I ; sez he *' Stan' 

back ! " " Aint you a buster ? " 
Sez I, " I 'm up to all thet air, I guess I 've ben 

to muster ; 
I know wy sentinuls air sot ; you aint agoin' to 

eat us ; 
Caleb haint no monopoly to court the seenoreetas ; 
My folks to hum air full ez good ez hisn be, by 

golly ! " 
An' so ez I wuz goin' by, not thinkin' wut would 

folly, 
The everlastin' cus he stuck his one - pronged 

pitchfork in me 
An' made a hole right thru my close ez ef I wuz 
an in'my. 

Wal, it beats all how big I felt hoorawin' in ole 

Funnel 
Wen Mister Bolles he gin the sword to our 

Leftenant Cunnle, 



66 THE B I GLOW PAPERS. 

(It's Mister Secondary BoUes,^ thet writ the 

prize peace essay ; 
Thet 's wy he did n't list himself along o' us, I 

dessay,) 
An' Rantoul, tu, talked pooty loud, but don't 

put his foot in it, 
Coz human life's so sacred thet he 's principled 

agin' it, — 
Though I myself can't rightly see it 's any wus 

achokin' on 'em 
Than puttin' bullets thru their lights, or with a 

bagnet pokin' on 'em ; 
How dre£9.e sHck he reeled it off, (like Blitz at 

our lyceum 
Ahaulin' ribbins from his chops so quick you 

skeercely see 'em,) 
About the Anglo-Saxon race (an' saxons would 

be handy 
To du the buryin' down here upon the Rio 

Grandy), 
About our patriotic pas an' our star-spangled 

banner. 
Our country's bird alookin' on an' singin' out ho- 

sanner, 
An' how he (Mister B. himself) wuz happy fer 

Ameriky, — 
I felt, ez sister Patience sez, a leetle mite hister- 

icky. 

1 the ignerant creeter means Sekketary; but he oilers stuck 
to his books like cobbler's wax to an ile-stone. — H. B. 



THE BIG LOW PAPERS. 67 

I felt, I swon, ez though it wuz a dreffle kind o' 

privilege 
Atrampin' round thru Boston streets among the 

gutter's drivelage ; 
I act'lly thought it wuz a treat to hear a little 

drummin', 
An' it did bonyfidy seem millanynm wuz acomin' 
Wen all on us got suits (darned like them wore 

in the state prison) 
An' every feller felt ez though all Mexico wuz 

hisn.^ 

This 'ere 's about the meanest place a skunk 

could wal diskiver 
(Saltillo 's Mexican, I b'lieve, fer wut we call 

Saltriver). 
The sort o' trash a feller gits to eat does beat all 

nater, 
I 'd give a year's pay fer a smell o' one good 

bluenose tater ; 
The country here thet Mister Bolles declared to 

be so charmin' 
Throughout is swarmin' with the most alarmin' 

kind o' varmin'. 

1 it must be aloud that thare 's a streak o' nater in lovin' 
sho, but it sartinly is 1 of the curusest things in nater to see 
a rispecktable dri goods dealer (deekon ofT a chutch ma^'by) 
a riggiu' himself out in the "Weigh they du and struttin' 
round in the Reign aspilin' his trowsis and makin wet goods 
of himself. Ef any thin' s foolisher and moor dicklus than 
militerry gloary it is milishy gloary. — H. B. 



68 THE BIGLOW PAPERS. 

He talked about delishis froots, but then it wuz a 

wopper all, 
The hoU on't 's mud an' prickly pears, with here 

an' there a chapparal ; 
You see a feller peekin' out, an', fust you know, 

a lariat 
Is round your throat an' you a copse, 'fore you 

can say, " Wut air ye at ? " ^ 
You never see sech darned gret bugs (it may not 

be irrelevant 
To say I 've seen a scarahmus pilularius ^ big ez 

a year old elephant,) 
The rigiment come up one day in time to stop a 

red bug 
From runnin' off with Cunnle Wright, — 't wuz 

jest a common cimex lectularius. 
One night I started up on eend an' thought I wuz 

to hum agin, 
I heern a horn, thinks I it 's Sol the fisherman 

hez come agin, 
His bellowses is sound enough, — ez I 'm a livin' 

creeter, 
I felt a tiling go thru my leg, — 't wuz nothin' 

more 'n a skeeter ! 

1 these fellers are verry proppilh^ called Rank Heroes, and 
the more tha kill the ranker and more Herowick tha bekum. 

— H. B. 

2 it WUZ "tumblebug" as he Writ it, but the parson put 
the Latten instid. i sed tother maid better meeter, but he 
said tha was eddvkated peepl to Boston and tha would n't 
stan' it no how. idnow as tha wood and idnow as tha wood. 

— H. B. 



THE BIG LOW FAFEES. G9 

Then there 's the yaller fever, tu, they call it here 

el vomito, — 
(Come, thet wun't du, you landcrab there, I tell 

ye to le' ffo my toe I 
My gracious ! it 's a scorpion thet 's took a sliine 

to play with 't, 
I dars n't skeer the tarnal tiling fer fear he 'd run 

away with 't.) 
Afore I come away from hum I hed a strong per- 
suasion 
Thet Mexicans wor n't human beans, ^ — an ou- 

rang outang nation, 
A sort o' folks a chap could kill an' never dream 

on 't arter. 
No more 'n a feller 'd dream o' pigs thet he hed 

hed to slarter ; 
I 'd an idee thet they were built arter the darkle 

fashion all. 
An' kickin' colored folks about, you know, 's a 

kind o' national ; 
But wen I jined I wor n 't so wise ez thet air 

queen o' Sheby, 
Fer, come to look at 'em, they aint much diff'rent 

from wut we be, 
An' here we air ascrougin' 'em out o' thir own 

dominions, 
Ashelterin' 'em, ez Caleb sez, under our eagle's 

pinions, 

1 he means human beins, that 's wut he means, i spose he 
kinder thought tha wuz human beans ware the Xisle Poles 
comes from. — H. B. 



70 THE BIG LOW PAPERS. 

Wich means to take a feller up jest by the slack 

o' 's trowsis 
An' walk him Spanish clean right out o' all his 

homes an' houses ; 
Wal, it does seem a curus way, but then hooraw 

f er Jackson ! 
It must be right, f er Caleb sez it 's reg'lar Anglo- 

saxon. 
The Mex'cans don't fight fair, they say, they piz'n 

all the water. 
An' du amazin' lots o' things, thet is n't wut they 

ough' to ; 
Bein' they haint no lead, they make their bullets 

out o' copper 
An' shoot the darned things at us, tu, wich Caleb 

sez aint proper ; 
He sez they 'd ough' to stan' right up an' let us 

pop 'em fairly, 
(Guess wen he ketches 'em at thet he '11 hev to 

git up airly,) 
Thet our nation 's bigger 'n theirn an' so its 

rights air bigger. 
An' thet it 's all to make 'em free thet we air 

puUin' trigger. 
The Anglo Saxondom's idee 's abreakin' 'em to 

pieces, 
An' thet idee 's thet every man doos jest wut he 

damn pleases ; 
Ef I don't make his meanin' clear, perhaps in 

some respex I can. 



THE BIGLOW PAPERS. 71 

I know thet " every man " don't mean a nigger 

or a Mexican ; 
An' there 's another thing I know, an' thet is ef 

these creeturs, 
Thet stick an Anglosaxon mask onto State-prison 

feeturs, 
Should come to Jaalam Centre fer to argify an' 

spout on 't, 
The gals 'ould count the silver spoons the minnit 

they cleared out on 't. 

This goin' ware glory waits ye haint one agree- 
able feetur, 
An' ef it wor n't fer wakin' snakes, I 'd home 

agin short meter ; 
O, would n't I be off, quick time, ef 't wor n't 

thet I wuz sartin 
They 'd let the daylight into me to pay me fer 

desartin ! 
I don't approve o' tellin' tales, but jest to you I 

may state 
Our ossifers aint wut they wuz afore they left 

the Bay-state ; 
Then it wuz " Mister Sawin, sir, you 're middlin' 

well now, be ye ? 
Step up an' take a nipper, sir ; I 'm dreffle glad 

to see ye ; " 
But now it 's " "Ware 's my eppylet? here, Sawin, 

step an' fetch it ! 
An' mind your eye, be thund'rin' spry, or, damn 

ye, you shall ketch it ! " 



72 THE BIGLOW PAPERS. 

Wal, ez the Doctor sez, some pork will bile so, 

but by mighty, 
Ef I hed some on 'em to hum, I 'd give 'em 

linkumvity, 
I 'd play the rogue's march on their hides an' 

other music f ollerin' 

But I must close my letter here, for one on 'em 's 

a hollerin'. 
These Anglosaxon ossif ers, — wal, taint no use 

ajawin', 
X 'm safe enlisted fer the war, 
Yourn, 

BIRDOFREDOM SAWIN. 



[Those hare not been wanting (as, indeed, when 
hath Satan been to seek for attorneys ?) who have 
maintained that our late inroad upon Mexico was 
undertaken, not so much for the avenging of any na- 
tional quarrel, as for the spreading of free institu- 
tions and of Protestantism. Capita vix duabus An- 
ticyris medenda ! Yerily I admire that no pious ser- 
geant among these new Crusaders beheld Martin 
Luther riding at the front of the host upon a tamed 
pontifical bull, as, in that former invasion of Mexico, 
the zealous Diaz (spawn though he were of the 
Scarlet Woman) was favored with a vision of St. 
James of Compostella, skewering the infidels upon 
his apostolic lance. We read, also, that Richard of 
the lion heart, having gone to Palestine on a similar 
errand of mercy, was divinely encouraged to cut the 
throats of such Paynims as refused to swallow the 



THE BIG LOW PAPERS. 73 

bread of life (doubtless that they might be there- 
after incapacitated for swallowing the filthy gobbets 
of Mahound) by angels of heaven, who cried to the 
king and his knights, Seigneurs, tuez! tuez! provi- 
dentially using the French tongue, as being the only 
one understood by their auditors. This would argue 
for the pautoglottism of these celestial intelligences, 
while on the other hand, the Devil, teste Cotton Ma- 
ther, is unversed in certain of the Indian dialects. 
Yet must he be a semeiologist the most expert mak- 
ing himself intelligible to every people and kindred 
by signs ; no other discourse, indeed, being need- 
ful, than such as the mackerel-fisher holds with his 
finned quarry, who, if other bait be wanting, can by 
a bare bit of white rag at the end of a string capti- 
vate those foolish fishes. Such piscatorial oratory is 
Satan cunning in. Before one he trails a hat and 
feather, or a bare feather without a hat ; before an- 
other, a Presidential chair, or a tidewaiter's stool, op 
a pulpit in the city, no matter what. To us, dan- 
gling there over our heads, they seem junkets dropped 
out of the seventh heaven, sops dipped in nectar, but, 
once in our mouths, they are all one, bits of fuzzy 
cotton. 

This, however, by the way. It is time now revo- 
care gradum. Wliile so many miracles of this sort, 
vouched by eyewitnesses, have encouraged the arms 
of Papists, not to speak of those Dioscuri (whom we 
must conclude imps of the pit) who sundry times 
captained the pagan Roman soldiery, it is strange 
that our first American crusade was not in some such 
wise also signalized. Yet it is said that the Lord 
hath manifestly prospered our armies. This opens 



74 THE B I GLOW PAPERS. 

the question, whether, when our hands are strength- 
ened to make great slaughter of our enemies, it be 
absolutely and demonstratively certain that this 
might is added to us from above, or whether some 
Potentate from an opposite quarter may not have a 
finger in it, as there are few pies into which his med- 
dling digits are not thrust. Would the Sanctifier 
and Setter-apart of the seventh day have assisted in 
a victory gained on the Sabbath, as was one in the 
late war ? Or has that day become less an object 
of his especial care since the year 1697, when so 
manifest a providence occurred to Mr. William 
Trowbridge, in answer to whose prayers, when he 
and all on shipboard with him were starving, a dol- 
phin was sent daily, "which was enough to serve 
'em ; only on Saturdays they still catched a couple, 
and on the Lord^s Days they could catch none at 
all " ? Haply they might have been permitted, by 
way of mortification, to take some few sculpins 
(those banes of the salt-water angler), which un- 
seemly fish would, moreover, have conveyed to them 
a symbolical reproof for their breach of the day, 
being known in the rude dialect of our mariners as 
Cape Cod Clergymen. 

It has been a refreshment to many nice consciences 
to know that our Chief Magistrate would not regard 
with eyes of approval the (by many esteemed) sin- 
ful pastime of dancing, and I own myself to be so 
far of that mind, that I could not but set my face 
against this Mexican Polka, though danced to the 
Presidential piping with a Gubernatorial second. If 
ever the country should be seized with another such 
mania de propaganda Jide, I think it would be wise 



THE B I GLOW PAPERS. 75 

to fill our bombshells with alternate copies of the 
Cambridge Platform and the Thirty-nine Articles, 
which would produce a mixture of the highest ex- 
plosive power, and to wrap every one of our cannon- 
balls in a leaf of the New Testament, the reading of 
which is denied to those who sit in the darkness of 
Popery. Those iron evangelists would thus be able 
to disseminate vital religion and Gospel truth in 
quarters inaccessible to the ordinary missionary. I 
have seen lads, unimpreguate with the more subli- 
mated punctiliousness of Walton, secure pickerel, 
taking their unwary siesta beneath the lily-pads too 
nigh the surface, with a gun and small shot. Why not, 
then, since gunpowder was unknown to the Apostles 
(not to enter here upon the question whether it were 
discovered before that period by the Chinese), suit 
our metaphor to the age in wliich we live, and say 
shooters as well s^s fishers of men? 

I do much fear that we shall be seized now and 
then with a Protestant fervor, as long as we have 
neighbor Naboths whose wallowings in Papistical 
mire excite our horror in exact proportion to the size 
and desirableness of their vineyards. Yet I rejoice 
that some earnest Protestants have been made by 
this war, — I mean those who protested agamst it. 
Fewer they were than I could wish, for one might 
imagine America to have been colonized by a tribe 
of those nondescript African animals the Aye- Ayes, 
so difficult a word is No to us all. There is some 
malformation or defect of the vocal organs, wliich 
either prevents our uttering it at all, or gives it so 
thick a pronunciation as to be unintelligible. A 
mouth filled with the national pudding, or watering 



76 THE BIGLOW PAPERS. 

in expectation thereof, is wholly incompetent to this 
refractory monosyllable. An abject and herpetic 
Public Opinion is the Pope, the Anti-Christ, for us to 
protest against e corde cordium. And by what Col- 
lege of Cardinals is tliis our God's-vicar, our binder 
and looser, elected ? Very like, by the sacred con- 
clave of Tag, Rag, and Bobtail, in the gracious at- 
mosphere of the grog-shop. Yet it is of this that we 
must all be puppets. This thumps the pulpit-cush- 
ion, this guides the editor's pen, this wags the sena- 
tor's tongue. This decides what Scriptures are canon- 
ical, and shuffles Christ away into the Apocrypha. 
According to that sentence fathered upon Solon, O0tw 
Sr]fx6(nov KttKhu epx^rai oiKaS' kKacrrcf. This unclean 
spirit is skilful to assume various shapes. I have 
known it to enter my own study and nudge my el- 
bow of a Saturday under the semblance of a wealthy 
member of my congregation. It were a great bless- 
ing, if every particular of what in the sum we call 
popular sentiment could carry about the name of its 
manufacturer stamped legibly upon it. I gave a 
stab under the fifth rib to that pestilent fallacy, — 
"Our country, right or wrong," — by tracing its 
original to a speech of Ensign Cilley at a dinner of 
the Bungtown Fencibles. — H. W.] 



No. III. 
WHAT MR. ROBINSON THINKS. 

[A FEW remarks on the following verses will not 
be out of place. The satire in them was not meant 
to have any personal, but only a general, application. 
Of the gentleman upon whose letter they were in- 
tended as a commentary, Mr. Biglow had never heard 
till he saw the letter itself. The position of the sat- 
irist is oftentimes one which he would not have 
chosen, had the election been left to himself. In at- 
tacking bad principles, he is obliged to select some 
individual who has made himself their exponent, and 
in whom they are unpersonate, to the end that what 
he says may not, through ambiguity, be dissipated 
tenues in auras. For what says Seneca ? Longum 
iter per prcecepta, breve et efficace per exempla. A bad 
principle is comparatively harmless while it continues 
to be an abstraction, nor can the general mind com- 
prehend it fully till it is printed in that large type 
which all men can read at sight, namely, the life and 
character, the sayings and doings, of particular per- 
sons. It is one of the cunningest fetches of Satan, 
that he never exposes hmiself directly to our arrows, 
but, still dodging behind this neighbor or that ac- 
quaintance, compels us to wound him through them, 
if at all. He holds our affections as hostages, the 
while he patches up a truce with our conscience. 

Meanwliile, let us not forget that the aim of the 



78 THE BIGLOW PAPERS. 

true satirist is not to be severe upon persons, but only 
upon falsehood, and, as Truth and Falsehood start 
from the same point, and sometimes even go along 
together for a little way, his business is to follow the 
path of the latter after it diverges, and to show her 
floundering in the bog at the end of it. Truth is 
quite beyond the reach of satire. There is so brave 
a simplicity in her, that she can no more be made ri- 
diculous than an oak or a pine. The danger of the 
satirist is, that continual use may deaden his sensibil- 
ity to the force of language. He becomes more and 
more liable to strike harder than he knows or intends. 
He may be careful to put on his boxing-gloves, and 
yet forget, that, the older they grow, the more plain- 
ly may the knuckles inside be felt. Moreover, in 
the heat of contest, the eye is insensibly drawn to the 
crown of victory, whose tawdry tinsel glitters tlu'ough 
that dust of the ring wliich obscures Truth's wreath 
of simple leaves. I have sometimes thought that 
my young friend, Mr. Biglow, needed a monitory 
hand laid on his arm, — aliquid suffiaminandus erat. 
I have never thought it good husbandry to water the 
tender plants of reform with aqua fortis, yet, where 
so much is to do in the beds, he were a sorry gar- 
dener who should wage a whole day's war with an 
iron scuffle on those ill weeds that make the garden- 
walks of life unsightly, when a sprinkle of Attic salt 
will wither them up. Est ars etiam maledicendi, says 
Scaliger, and truly it is a hard thing to say where the 
graceful gentleness of the lamb merges in downright 
sheepishness. We may conclude with worthy and 
wise Dr. Fuller, that " one may be a lamb in private 
wrongs, but in hearing general affronts to goodness 
they are asses which are not lions." — H. W. 



THE BIGLOW PAPERS. 79 

GuvENER B. is a sensible man ; 

He stays to liis home an' looks arter his folks, 
He draws his furrer ez straight ez he can, 
An' into nobody's tater-patch pokes ; — 
But John P. 
Robinson he 
Sez he wunt vote fer Guvener B. 

My ! aint it terrible ? Wut shall we du ? 

We can't never choose him, o' course, — that '3 
flat; 
Guess we shall hev to come round, (don't you ? ) 
An' go in fer thunder an' guns, an all that ; 
Fer John P. 
Robinson he 
Sez he wunt vote fer Guvener B. 

Gineral C is a dreffle smart man : 

He 's ben on all sides thet give places or pelf ; 
But consistency still wuz a part of his plan, — 
He 's ben true to one party, — ari' thet is him- 
self, — 

So John P. 
Robinson he 
Sez he shall vote fer Gineral C. 

Gineral C. he goes in fer the war ; 

He don't vally principle more 'n an old cud ; 
Wut did God make us raytional creeturs fer, 

But glory an' gunpowder, plunder an' blood ? 



80 THE BIGLOW PAPERS. 

So John P. 
Robinson he 
Sez he shall vote fer Gineral C. 

We were gittin' on nicely up here to our village, 
With good old idees o' wut's right an' wut 
aint, 
We kind o' thought Christ went agin war an' pil- 



An' thet eppyletts wor n't the best mark of a 
saint ; 

But John P. 
Robinson he 
Sez this kind o' thing 's an exploded idee. 

The side of our country must oilers be took, 
An' Presidunt Polk, you know, he is our coun- 
try, 
An' the angel thet writes all our sins in a book 
Puts the debit to him, an' to us the j^er* contry ; 
An' John P. 
Robinson he 
Sez this is his view o' the thing to a T. 

Parson Wilbur he calls all these argimunts lies ; 
Sez they 're nothin' on airth but jest fee, faw, 
fum; 
An' thet all this big talk of our destinies 

Is half on it ignorance an' t'other half 
rum ; 



THE BIGLOW PAPERS. 81 

But John P. 
Robinson he 
Sez it aint no sech thing ; an', of course, so 
must we. 

Parson Wilbur sez he never heerd in liis life 
Thet th' Apostles rigged out in their swaller- 
tail coats 
An' marched round in front of a drum an' a fife. 
To git some on 'em office, an' some on 'em 
votes, 

But John P. 
Robinson he 
Sez they did n't know everythin' down in 
Judee. 

Wal, it 's a marcy we 've gut folks to tell us 
The rights an' the wrongs o' these matters, I 
vow; 
God sends country lawyers, an' other wise fellers, 
To drive the world's team wen it gits in a 
slough, 

Fer John P. 
Robinson he 
Sez the world '11 go right, ef he hollers out 
Gee. 

[The attentive reader will doubtless have perceived 
in the foregoing poem an allusion to that pernicious 
sentiment, "Our country, right or wrong." It is an 



82 TEE BIGLOW PAPERS. 

abuse of language to call a certain portion of land, 
much more, certain personages elevated for tlie time 
being to high station, our country. I would not sever 
nor loosen a single one of those ties by which we are 
united to the spot of our birth, nor minish by a tittle 
the respect due to the Magistrate. I love our own 
Bay State too well to do the one, and as for the other, 
I have myself for nigh forty years exercised, however 
unworthily, the function of Justice of the Peace, hav- 
ing been called thereto by the unsolicited kindness of 
that most excellent man and upright patriot, Caleb 
Strong. Patrice fumus igne alieno luculentior is best 
qualified with this, Uhi libertas, ibi patria. We are 
inhabitants of two worlds, and owe a double, but not 
a divided, allegiance. In virtue of our clay, this little 
ball of earth exacts a certain loyalty of us, while, in 
our capacity as spirits, we are admitted citizens of an 
invisible and holier fatherland. There is a patriot- 
ism of the soul whose claim absolves us from our 
other and terrene fealty. Our true country is that 
ideal realm which we represent to ourselves under 
the names of religion, duty, and the like. Our ter- 
restrial organizations are but far-off approaches to so 
fair a model, and all they are verily traitors who 
resist not any attempt to divert them from this their 
original intendment. When, therefore, one would 
have us to fling up our caps and shout with the mul- 
titude, " Our country, liowever hounded ! " he de- 
mands of us that we sacrifice the larger to the less, 
the higher to the lower, and that we yield to the im- 
aginary claims of a few acres of soil our duty and 
privilege as liegemen of Truth. Our true country is 
bounded on the north and the south, on the east and 



THE BIGLOW PAPERS. 83 

the west, by Justice, and when she oversteps that in- 
visible boundary-line by so much as a hair's-breadth, 
she ceases to be our mother, and chooses rather to be 
looked upon quasi noverca. That is a hard choice, 
when our earthly love of country calls upon us to 
tread one path and our duty points us to another. 
We must make as noble and becoming an election as 
did Penelope between Icarius and Ulysses. Veiling 
our faces, we must take silently the hand of Duty to 
follow her. 

Shortly after the publication of the foregoing poem, 
there appeared some comments upon it in one of the 
public prints which seemed to call for some animad- 
version. I accordingly addressed to Mr. Bucking- 
ham, of the Boston Courier, the following letter : — 

" Jaalam, November 4, 1847. 
" To the Editor of the Courier : 

" Respected Sir, — Calling at the post-office this 
morning, our worthy and efficient postmaster offered 
for my perusal a paragraph in the Boston Morning 
Post of the 3d instant, wherein certain effusions of 
the pastoral muse are attributed to the pen of Mr. 
James Russell Lowell. For aught I know or can 
affirm to the contrary, this Mr. Lowell may be a very 
deserving person and a youth of parts (though I 
have seen verses of his which I could never rightly 
understand) ; and if he be such, he, I am certain, as 
well as I, would be free from any proclivity to appro- 
priate to himself whatever of credit (or discredit) 
may honestly belong to another. I am confident, 
that, in penning these few lines, I am only forestall- 
ing a disclaimer from that young gentleman, whose 



'84 THE B I GLOW PAPERS. 

silence hitherto, when rumor pointed to himward, has 
excited in my bosom mingled emotions of sorrow and 
surprise. Well may my young parishioner, Mr. Big- 
low, exclaim with the poet, 

* Sic vos non vobis,' etc. 

though, in saying this, I would not convey the im- 
pression that he is a proficient in the Latin tongue, — 
the tongue, I might add, of a Horace and a TuUy. 

" Mr. B. does not employ his pen, I can safely say, 
for any lucre of worldly gain, or to be exalted by the 
carnal plaudits of men, digito monstrari, etc. He does 
not wait upon Providence for mercies, and in his 
heart mean merces. But I should esteem myself as 
verily deficient in my duty (who am his friend and in 
some unworthy sort his spiritual Jidus Achates, etc.), 
if I did not step forward to claim for him whatever 
measure of applause might be assigned to him by the 
judicious. 

" If this were a fitting occasion, I might venture 
here a brief dissertation touching the manner and 
kind of my young friend's poetry. But I dubitate 
whether this abstruser sort of speculation (though en- 
livened by some apposite instances from Aristopha- 
nes) would sufficiently interest your oppidan readers. 
As regards their satirical tone, and their plainness of 
speech, I will only say, that, in my pastoral experi- 
ence, I have found that the Arch-Enemy loves noth- 
ing better than to be treated as a religious, moral, 
and intellectual being, and that there is no apage 
Sathanas I so potent as ridicule. But it is a kind of 
weapon that must have a button of good-nature on 
the point of it. 



THE B I GLOW PAPERS. 85 

" Tlie productions of Mr. B. have been stigmatized 
iu some quarters as unpatriotic ; but I can vouch 
that he loves his native soil with that hearty, though 
discriminating, attachment which springs from an 
intimate social intercourse of many years' standing. 
In the ploughing season, no one has a deeper share 
in the well-being of the country than he. If Dean 
Swift were right in saying that he who makes two 
blades of grass grow where one grew before confers 
a greater benefit on the state than he who taketh a 
city, Mr. B. might exhibit a fairer claim to the Presi- 
dency then General Scott himself. I think that some 
of those disinterested lovers of the hard-handed de- 
mocracy, whose fingers have never touched anything 
rougher than the dollars of our common country, 
would hesitate to compare palms with him. It would 
do your heart good, respected Sir, to see that young 
man mow. He cuts a cleaner and wider swarth than 
any in this town. 

" But it is time for me to be at my Post. It is 
very clear that my young friend's shot has struck the 
lintel, for the Post is shaken (Amos ix. 1). The 
editor of that paper is a strenuous advocate of the 
Mexican war, and a colonel, as I am given to under- 
stand. I presume, that, being necessarily absent iu 
Mexico, he has left his journal in some less judicious 
hands. At any rate, the Post has been too swift on 
this occasion. It could hardly have cited a more in- 
controvertible line from any poem than that which it 
has selected for animadversion, namely, — 

* We kind o' thought Christ went agin war an' pillage.' 

" If the Post maintains the converse of this propo- 



86 THE BIGLO W PAPERS. 

sition, it can hardly be considered as a safe guide- 
post for the moral and religious portions of its party, 
however many other excellent qualities of a post it 
may be blessed with. There is a sign in London on 
which is painted, 'The Green Man.' It would do 
very well as a portrait of any individual who would 
support so unscriptural a thesis. As regards the 
language of the line in question, I am bold to say 
that He who readeth the hearts of men will not ac- 
count any dialect unseemly which conveys a sound 
and pious sentiment. I could wish that such senti- 
ments were more common, however uncouthly ex- 
pressed. Saint Ambrose affirms, that Veritas a quo- 
cunque (why not, then, quomodocunque ? ) dicatur, a 
spiritu sancto est. Digest also this of Baxter : ' The 
plainest words are the most profitable oratory in the 
weightiest matters.' 

" When the paragraph in question was shown to 
Mr. Biglow, the only part of it which seemed to give 
him any dissatisfaction was that which classed him 
with the Whig party. He says, that, if resolutions 
are a nourishing kind of diet, that party must be in a 
very hearty and flourishing condition ; for that they 
have quietly eaten more good ones of their own baking 
than he could have conceived to be possible without 
repletion. He has been for some years past (I re- 
gret to say) an ardent opponent of those sound doc- 
trines of protective policy which form so prominent 
a portion of the creed of that party. I confess, that, 
in some discussions which I have had with him on 
this point in my study, he has displayed a vein of ob- 
stinacy which I had not hitherto detected in his com- 
position. He is also Qiorresco referens') infected in no 



THE BIG LOW PAPERS. 87 

small measure with the peculiar notions of a print 
called the Liberator, whose heresies I take every 
proper opportunity of combating, and of which, I 
thank God, I have never read a single line. 

" I did not see Mr. B.'s verses until they appeared 
in print, and there is certainly one thing in them 
which I consider highly improper. I allude to the 
personal references to myself by name. To confer 
notoriety on an humble individual who is laboring 
quietly in his vocation, and who keeps his cloth as 
free as he can from the dust of the political arena 
(though vce miJii si non evangelizavero), is no doubt an 
indecorum. The sentiments which he attributes to 
me I will not deny to be mine . They were embodied, 
though in a different form, in a discourse preached 
upon the last day of public fasting, and were accept- 
able to my entire people (of whatever political views), 
except the postmaster, who dissented ex officio. I ob- 
serve that you sometimes devote a portion of your 
paper to a religious summary. I should be well 
pleased to furnish a copy of my discourse for insertion 
in this department of your instructive journal. By 
omitting the advertisements, it might easily be got 
within the limits of a single number, and I venture 
to insure you the sale of some scores of copies in this 
town. I will cheerfully render myself responsible 
for ten. It might possibly be advantageous to issue 
it as an extra. But perhaps you will not esteem it an 
object, and I will not press it. My offer does not 
spring from any weak desire of seeing my name in 
print ; for I can enjoy this satisfaction at any time 
by turning to the Triennial Catalogue of the Uni- 
versity, where it also possesses that added emphasis 



88 THE BIGLOW PAPERS. 

of Italics with whicli those of my calling are distin- 
guished. 

" I would simply add, that I continue to fit ingen- 
uous youth for college, and that I have two spacious 
and airy sleeping apartments at this moment unoccu- 
pied. Ingenuas didicisse, etc. Terms, which vary ac- 
cording to the circumstances of the parents, may be 
known on application to me by letter, post paid. In 
all cases the lad will be expected to fetch his own 
towels. This rule, Mrs. W. desires me to add, has 
no exceptions. 

" Respectfully, your obedient servant, 

"HOMER WILBUR, A.M. 

" P. S. Perhaps the last paragraph may look like 
an attempt to obtain the insertion of my circular gra- 
tuitously. If it should appear to you in that light, I 
desire that you would erase it, or charge for it at the 
usual rates, and deduct the amount from the pro- 
ceeds in your hands from the sale of my discourse, 
when it shall be printed. My circular is much longer 
and more explicit, and will be forwarded without 
charge to any who may desire it. It has been very 
neatly executed on a letter sheet, by a very deserving 
printer, who attends upon my ministry, and is a cred- 
itable specimen of the typographic art. I have one 
hung over my mantelpiece in a neat frame, where it 
makes a beautiful and appropriate ornament, and 
balances the profile of Mrs. W., cut with her toes by 
the young lady born without arms. H. W." 

I have in the foregoing letter mentioned General 
Scott in connection with the Presidency, because I 



THE BIGLOW PAPERS. 89 

have been given to understand that he has blown to 
pieces and otherwise caused to be destroyed more 
Mexicans than any other commander. His claim 
would therefore be deservedly considered the strong- 
est. Until accurate returns of the Mexican killed, 
womided, and maimed be obtained, it will be difficult 
to settle these nice points of precedence. Should it 
prove that any other officer has been more meritorious 
and destructive than General S., and has thereby ren- 
dered himself more worthy of the confidence and sup- 
port of the conservative portion of our community, I 
shall cheerfully insert his name, instead of that of 
General S., in a future edition. It may be thought, 
likewise, that General S. has invalidated his claims by 
too much attention to the decencies of apparel, and 
the habits belonging to a gentleman. These ab- 
struser points of statesmanship are beyond my scope. 
I wonder not that successful military achievement 
should attract the admiration of the multitude. 
Rather do I rejoice with wonder to behold how rap- 
idly this sentiment is losing its hold upon the popular 
mind. It is related of Thomas Warton, the second of 
that honored name who held the office of Poetry Pro- 
fessor at Oxford, that, when one wished to find him, 
being absconded, as was his wont, in some obscure 
alehouse, he was counselled to traverse the city with a 
drum and fife, the sound of which inspiring music 
would be sure to draw the Doctor from his retirement 
into the street. We are all more or less bitten with 
this martial insanity. Nescio qua dulcedine . . . 
cunc'os ducit. I confess to some infection of that itch 
myself. When I see a Brigadier-General maintain- 
mg his insecure elevation in the saddle under the 



90 THE B I GLOW PAPERS. 

severe fire of the trpining-field, and when I remem- 
ber that some military enthusiasts, through haste, in- 
experience, or an over-desire to lend reality to those 
fictitious combats, will sometimes discharge their ram- 
rods, I cannot but admire, while I deplore, the mis- 
taken devotion of those heroic officers. Semel insani- 
vimus omnes. I was myself, during the late war with 
Great Britain, chaplain of a regiment, which was 
fortunately never called to active military duty. I 
mention this circumstance with regret rather than 
pride. Had I been summoned to actual warfare, I 
trust that I might have been strengthened to bear 
myself after the manner of that reverend father in 
our New England Israel, Dr. Benjamin Colman, who, 
as we are told in Turell's life of him, when the vessel 
in which he had taken passage for England was at- 
tacked by a French privateer, " fought like a philoso- 
pher and a Christian, . . . and prayed all the while 
he charged and fired." As this note is already long, 
I shall not here enter upon a discussion of the ques- 
tion, whether Christians may lawfully be soldiers. I 
think it sufficiently evident, that, during the first two 
centuries of the Christian era, at least, the two pro- 
fessions were esteemed incompatible. Consult Jortin 
onthishead. — H. W.] 



No. IV. 

REMARKS OF INCREASE D. O'PHACE, ESQUIRE, AT AN 
EXTRUMPERY CAUCUS IN STATE STREET, REPORTED 
BY MR. H. BIGLOW. 

[The ingenious reader will at once understand that 
no such speech as the following was ever totidem verbis 
pronounced. But there are simpler and less guarded 
wits, for the satisfying of which such an explanation 
may be needful. For there are certain invisible lines, 
which as Truth successively overpasses, she becomes 
Untruth to one and another of us, as a large river, 
flowing from one kingdom into another, sometimes 
takes a new name, albeit the waters undergo no 
change, how small soever. There is, moreover, a 
truth of fiction more veracious than the truth of fact, 
as that of the Poet, which represents to us things and 
events as they ought to be, rather than servilely copies 
them as they are imperfectly imaged in the crooked 
and smoky glass of our mundane affairs. It is this 
which makes the speech of Antonius, though originally 
spoken in no wider a forum than the brain of Shak- 
speare, more historically valuable than that other which 
Appian has reported, by as much as the understand- 
ing of the Englishman was more comprehensive than 
that of the Alexandrian. Mr. Biglow, in the present 
instance, has only made use of a license assumed by 
all the historians of antiquity, who put into the 



92 THE B I GLOW PAPERS. 

mouths of various characters such words as seem to 
them most fitting to the occasion and to the speaker. 
If it be objected that no such oration could ever have 
been delivered, I answer, that there are few assem- 
blages for speech-making which do not better deserve 
the title of Parliamentum Indoctorum than did the 
sixth Parliament of Henry the Fourth, and that men 
still continue to have as much faith in the Oracle of 
Fools as ever Pantagruel had. Howell, in his letters, 
recounts a merry tale of a certain ambassador of 
Queen Elizabeth, who, -having written two letters, 
one to her Majesty and the other to his wife, directed 
them at cross purposes, so that the Queen was be- 
ducked and bedeared and requested to send a change 
of hose, and the wife was beprincessed and otherwise 
unwontedly besuperlatived, till the one feared for the 
wits of her ambassador, the other for those of her 
husband. In like manner it may be presumed that 
our speaker has misdirected some of his thoughts, 
and given to the whole theatre what he would have 
wished to confide only to a select auditory at the back 
of the curtain. For it is seldom that we can get any 
fra,nk utterance from men, who address, for the most 
part, a Buncombe either in this world or the next. As 
for their audiences, it may be truly said of our people, 
that they enjoy one political institution in common with 
the ancient Athenians : I mean a certain profitless kind 
of ostracism, wherewith, nevertheless, they seem hith- 
erto well enough content. For in Presidential elec- 
tions, and other affairs of the sort, whereas I observe 
that the oysters fall to the lot of comparatively few, 
the shells (such as the privileges of voting as they are 
told to do by the ostrivori aforesaid, and of huzzaing 



THE BIGLOW PAPERS. 93 

at public meetings) are very liberally distributed 
among the people, as being their prescriptive and 
quite sufficient portion. 

The occasion of the speech is supposed to be Mr. 
Palfrey's refusal to vote for the Whig candidate for 
the Speakership. — H. W.] 



No? Hezhe? He haint, though? Wut ? Voted 

agin him ? 
Ef the bird of oui* country could ketch him, 

she 'd skin him ; 
I seem 's though I see her, with wrath in each 

quill 
Like a chancery lawyer, afilin' her bill, 
An' grindin' her talents ez sharp ez all nater. 
To pounce like a writ on the back o' the traiter. 
Forgive me, my friends, ef I seem to be het, 
But a crisis like tliis must with vigor be met ; 
Wen an Arnold the star-spangled banner be- 

stains, 
Holl Fourth o' Julys seem to bile in my veins. 

Who ever 'd ha' thought sech a pisonous rig 
Would be run by a chap thet wiiz chose fer a 

Wig? 
" We knowed wut liis principles wuz 'fore we 

• sent him ? " 
Wut wuz ther in them from this vote to pervent 

him ? 
A marciful Providunce fashioned us holler 
O' purpose thet we might our principles swaller ; 



94 THE BIGLOW PAPERS. 

It can hold any quantity on 'em, the belly can, 
An' bring 'em up ready fer use like the pelican, 
Or more like the kangaroo, who (wich is stranger) 
Puts her family into her pouch wen there 's 

danger. 
Aint principle precious ? then, who 's goin' to 

use it 
Wen there 's resk o' some chap's gittin' up to 

abuse it ? 
I can't tell the wy on 't, but nothin' is so sure 
Ez thet principle kind o' gits spiled by ex- 

posm-e ; ^ 
A man thet lets all sorts o' folks git a sight on 't 
Ough' to hev it all took right away, every mite 

on 't; 
Ef he can't keep it all to himself wen it's 

wise to, 
He aint one it 's fit to trust nothin' so nice to. 

Besides, ther 's a wonderful power in latitude 
To shift a man's morril relations an' attitude ; 

1 The speaker is of a different mind from Tully, who, in 
his recently discovered tractate De Republica, tells us, — 
Nee vero habere virtutem satis est, quasi artem aliquam, nisi 
utare, and from our Milton, who says, " I cannot praise a 
fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, 
that never sallies out and sees her adversar}'^, but slinks out 
of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for, not 
without dust and heat.'^ — At-eoj). He had taken the words 
out of the Roman's mouth, without knowing it, and might 
well exclaim with Austin (if a saint's name may stand spon- 
sor for a curse), Pereant qui ante nos nostra dixerint! — 
H. W. 



THE BIG LOW PAPERS. 95 

Some flossifers think thet a fakkilty 's granted 
The minnit it 's proved to be thoroughly wanted, 
Thet a change o' demand makes a change o' con- 
dition, 
An' thet everythin' 's nothin' except by position ; 
Ez fer instance, thet rubber-trees fust begun 

bearin' 
Wen p'htickle conshunces come into wearin', — 
Thet the fears of a monkey, whose holt chanced 

to fail, 
Drawed the vertibry out to a prehensile tail ; 
So, wen one 's chose to Congriss, ez soon ez he 's 

in it, 
A collar grows right round his neck in a minnit, 
An' sartin it is thet a man cannot be strict 
In bein' himself, wen he gits to the Deestrict, 
Fer a coat thet sets wal here in ole Massachu- 
setts, 
Wen it gits on to Washinton, somehow askew 
sets. 

Resolves, do you say, o' the Springfield Conven- 
tion ? 

Thet 's percisely the pint I was goin' to men- 
tion ; 

Resolves air a thing we most gen'ally keep ill, 

They 're a cheap kind o' dust fer the eyes 'o the 
people ; 

A parcel o' delligits jest git together 

An' chat fer a spell o' the crops an' the weather. 



96 THE BIGLOW PAPERS. 

Then, comin' to order, they squabble awile, 
An' let off the speeches they 're ferful '11 spile ; 
Then — Resolve, — Thet we wunt hev an inch 

o' slave territory ; 
Thet President Polk's holl perceedins air very 

tory; 
Thet the war 's a damned war, an' them thet 

enlist in it 
Should hev a cravat with a dreffle tight twist 

in it ; 
Thet the war is a war fer the spreadin' o' slav- 
ery ; 
Thet our army desarves our best thanks fer their 

bravery ; 
Thet we 're the original friends o' the nation, 
All the rest air a paltry an' base fabrication ; 
Thet we highly respect Messrs. A, B, an' C, 
An' ez deeply despise Messrs. E, F, an' G. 
In this way they go to the eend o' the chapter, 
An' then they bust out in a kind of a raptur 
About their own vartoo, an' folk's stone-blind- 



To the men thet 'ould actilly do 'em a kind- 
ness, — 

The American eagle, the Pilgrims thet landed. 

Till on ole Plymouth Rock they git j&nally 
stranded ; 

Wal, the people they listen and say, " Thet 's 
the ticket ; 

Ez fer Mexico, faint no great glory to lick it, 



THE BIGLOW PAPERS. ' 97 

But 't would be a darned shame to go puUin' o' 

triggers 
To extend the aree of abusin' the niggers." 
So they march in percessions, an' git up hooraws, 
An' tramp thru the mud fer the good o' the 

cause, 
An' think they 're a kind o' fulfillin' the prophe- 
cies, 
Wen they 're on'y jest changin' the holders of 

offices ! 
Ware A sot afore, B is comf'tably seated, 
One humbug 's victor'ous an' t'other defeated. 
Each honnable doughface gits jest wut he axes, 
An' the people — their annooal soft sodder an' 
taxes. 

Now, to keep unimpaired all these glorious feeturs 
Thet characterize morril and reasonin' creeturs, 
Thet give every paytriot all he can cram, 
Thet oust the untrustworthy Presidunt Flam, 
And stick honest Presidunt Sham in liis place 
To the manifest gain o' the holl human race, 
An' to some indervidgewals on 't in partickler, 
AVho love Public Opinion an' know how to tickle 

her, — 
I say thet a party with great aims like these 
Must stick jest ez close ez a hive full o' bees. 

I 'm willin' a man should go tollable strong 
Agin wrong in the abstract, fer thet kind o' 
wrong 



98 TEE BIG LOW PAPERS. 

Is oilers unpop'lar an' never gits pitied, 

Because it 's a crime no one never committed ; 

But lie mus' n't be hard on partickler sins, 

Coz then he '11 be kickin' the people's own shins. 

On'y look at the Demmercrats, see wut they 've 
done 

Jest simply by stickin' together like fun ; 

They 've sucked us right into a mis'able war 

Thet no one on airth aint responsible for ; 

They 've run us a hundred cool millions in debt, 

(An' f er Demmercrat Horners ther 's good plums 
left yet ;) 

They talk agin tayriffs, but act fer a high one, 

An' so coax all parties to build up their Zion ; 

To the people they 're oilers ez slick ez molas- 
ses, 

An' butter their bread on both sides with The 
Masses, 

Half o' whom they 've persuaded, by way of a 
joke, 

Thet Washinton's mantelpiece fell upon Polk. 

Now all o' these blessins the Wigs might enjoy, 
Ef they 'd gumption enough the right means to 

imploy ; ^ 
Fer the silver spoon born in Dermocracy's mouth 
Is a kind of a scringe thet they hev to the South ; 

1 That was a pithy saying of Persius, and fits our politi- 
cians without a wrinkle, Maglster artis, ingeniique largitor 
venter. — H. W. 



THE BIGLOW PAPERS. 99 

Their masters can cuss 'em an' kick 'em an' wale 

'em. 
An' they notice it less 'an the ass did to Balaam ; 
In this way they screw into second-rate offices 
Wich the slave-holder thinks 'ould substract too 

much off his ease ; 
The file-leaders, I mean, du, fer they, by their 

wiles, 
Unlike the old viper, grow fat on their files. 
Wal, the Wigs hev been tryin' to grab all this 

prey frum 'em 
An' to hook this nice spoon o' good fortin' away 

frum 'em. 
An' they might ha' succeeded ez likely ez not, 
In lickin' the Demmercrats all round the lot, 
Ef it war n't thet, wile all faithful Wigs were 

their knees on, 
Some stuffy old codger would holler out, — 

" Treason ! 
You must keep a sharp eye on a dog thet hez bit 

you once, 
An' / aint agoin' to cheat my constitoounts," — 
Wen every fool knows thet a man represents 
Not the fellers thet sent him, but them on the 

fence, — 
Impartially ready to jump either side 
An' make the fust use of a turn o' the tide, — 
The waiters on Providunce here in the city, 
Who compose wut they call a State Centerl Com- 

mitty. 



100 THE BIGLOW PAPERS. 

Constitooiints air hendy to help a man in, 
But arterwards don't weigh the heft of a pin. 
Wy, the people can't all live on Uncle Sam's pus, 
So they 've nothin' to du with 't f er better or 

wus ; 
It 's the folks thet air kind o' brought up to de- 
pend on 't 
Thet hev any consarn in 't, and thet is the end 
on't. 

Now here wuz New England ahevin' the honor 
Of a chance at the Speakership showered upon 

her ; — 
Do you say, " She don't want no more Speak- 
ers, but fewer ; 
She's hed plenty o' them, wut she wants is a 

doer " ? 
Fer the matter o' thet, it 's notorous in town 
Thet her own representatives du her quite brown. 
But thet 's nothin' to du with it ; wut right hed 

Palfrey 
To mix himself up with fanatical small fry ? 
War n't we gittin' on prime with our hot an' cold 

blowin' 
Acondemnin' the war wilst we kep' it agoin' ? 
We 'd assumed with gret skill a commandin' 

position, 
On this side or thet, no one could n't tell wich 

one. 
So, wutever side wipped, we 'd a chance at the 

plunder 



THE BIG LOW PAPERS. 101 

An' could sue fer infringin' our paytented thun- 
der ; 
We were ready to vote fer whoever wuz eligible, 
Ef on all pints at issoo he 'd stay unintelligible. 
Wal, sposin' we hed to gulp down our perfes- 

sions, 
We were ready to come out next mornin' with 

fresh ones ; 
Besides, ef we did, 't was our business alone, 
Fer could n't we du wut we would with our own ? 
An' ef a man can, wen pervisions hev riz so. 
Eat up his own words, it 's a marcy it is so. 

Wy, these chaps frum the North, with back- 
bones to 'em, darn 'em, 

'Ould be wuth more 'an Gennle Tom Thumb is 
to Barnum ; 

Ther 's enough thet to office on this very plan 

gl'OW, 

By exhibitin' how very small a man can grow ; 
But an M. C. frum here oilers hastens to state he 
Belongs to the order called invertebraty, 
Wence some gret filologists judge primy fashy 
Thet M. C. is M. T. by paronomashy ; 
An' these few exceptions air loosus naytury 
Folks 'ould put down their quarters to stare at 
like fury. 

It 's no use to open the door o' success, 

Ef a member can bolt so fer nothin' or less ; 



) 



102 THE B I GLOW PAPERS. 

Wy, all o' them grand constitootional pillers 
Our four fathers fetched with 'em over the bil- 

lers, 
Them pillers the people so soundly hev slept on, 
Wile to slav'ry, invasion, an' debt they were 

swept on, 
Wile our Destiny higher an' higher kep' mount- 
in', 
(Though I guess folks '11 stare wen she hends 

her account in,) 
Ef members in this way go kickin' agin 'em, 
They wunt hav so much ez a feather left in 'em. 

An', ez fer this Palfrey,^ we thought wen we 'd 
gnt him in, 

He 'd go kindly in wutever harness we put him in ; 

Supposin' we did know thet he wuz a peace man ? 

Doos he think he can be Uncle Samwell's police- 
man. 

An' wen Sam gits tipsy an' kicks up a riot, 

Lead him off to the lockup to snooze till he 's 
quiet ? 

Wy, the war is a war thet true paytriots can bear, 
ef 

It leads to the fat promised land of a tayriff ; 

We don't go an' fight it, nor aint to be driv on, 

Nor Demmercrats nuther, thet hev wut to live 
on; 

1 There is truth yet in this of Juvenal, — 

" Dat veniam corvis, vexat censura columbas." 



THE BIGLOW PAPERS. 103 

Ef it aint jest the thing thet 's well pleasin' to 

God, 
It makes us thought highly on elsewhere abroad ; 
The Rooshian black eagle looks blue in his eerie 
An' shakes both his heads wen he hears o' Mon- 

teery ; 
In the Tower Victory sets, all of a fluster, 
An' reads, with locked doors, how we won Cherry 

Buster ; 
An' old Pliilip Lewis — thet come an' kep' school 

here 
Fer the mere sake o' scorin' his ryalist ruler 
On the tenderest part of our kmgs infuturo — 
Hides his crown underneath an old shut in his 

bureau, 
Breaks off in his brags to a suckle o' merry kings, 
How he often hed hided young native Amerri- 

kins, 
An', turnin' quite faint in the midst of his fooler- 
ies. 
Sneaks down stairs to bolt the front door o' the 

Tooleries.-^ 

1 Jortin is willing to allow of other miracles besides those 
recorded in Holy Writ, and why not of other prophecies ? It 
is granting too much to Satan to suppose him, as divers of 
the learned have done, the inspirer of the ancient oracles. 
Wiser, I esteem it, to give chance the credit of the successful 
ones. What is said here of Louis Philippe was verified in 
some of its minute particulars within a few months' time. 
Enough to have made the fortune of Delphi or Hammon, and 
no thanks to Beelzebub neither ! That of Seneca in Medea 
will suit here : — 



104 THE BIGLOW PAPERS. 

You say, " We 'd ha' scared 'em by growin' in 

peace 
A plaguy sight more then by bobberies like 

these " ? 
Who is it dares say thet " our naytional eagle 
Wun't much longer be classed with the birds 

thet air regal, 
Coz theirn be hooked beaks, an' she, arter this 

slaughter, 
'11 bring back a bill ten times longer 'n she ough' 

to"? 
Wut 's your name ? Come, I see ye, you up- 
country feller, 
You 've put me out severil times with your 

beller ; 
Out with it! Wut? Biglow? I say nothin' 

f urder ; 
Thet feller would like nothin' better 'n a murder ; 
He 's a traiter, blasphemer, an' wut ruther worse 

is, 
He puts all his ath'ism in dreffle bad verses ; 
Socity aint safe tiU sech monsters air out on it, 
Refer to the Post, ef you hev the least doubt 

on it; 

" Rapida fortuna ac levis, 
Prsecepsque regno eripuit, exsilio dedit." 

Let us allow, even to richly deserved misfortune, our com- 
miseration, and be not over-hasty meanwhile in our censure 
of the French people, left for the first time to govern them- 
selves, remembering that wise sentence of -^schylus, — 

'ATTtts Se Tpaxvs octtis a.v veov Kparr}. 

H. W. 



THE BIGLOW PAPERS. 105 

Wy, he goes agin war, agin indirect taxes, 
Agin sellin' wild lands 'cept to settlers with axes, 
Agin holdin' o' slaves, though he knows it 's the 

corner 
Our libbaty rests on, the mis'able scorner ! 
In short, he would wholly upset with his ravages 
All thet keeps us above the brute critters an' 

savages. 
An' pitch into all kinds o' briles an' confusions 
The holl of our civilized, free institutions ; 
He writes fer thet rather unsafe print, the 

Courier, 
An' likely ez not hez a squintin' to Foorier ; 

I '11 be , thet is, I mean I '11 be blest, 

Ef I hark to a word frum so noted a pest ; 

I shan't talk with hhn, my religion 's too fervent. 

Good mornin', my friends, I 'm your most humble 

servant. 

[Into the question, whether the ability to express 
ourselves in articulate language has been productive 
of more good or evil, I shall not here enter at large. 
The two faculties of speech and of speech-making 
are wholly diverse in their natures. By the first we 
make ourselves intelligible, by the last unintelligible, 
to our fellows. It has not seldom occurred to me 
(noting how in our national legislature everything 
runs to talk, as lettuces, if the season or the soil be 
unpropitious, shoot up lankly to seed, instead of form- 
ing handsome heads) that Babel was the first Con- 
gress, the earliest mill erected for the manufacture 



106 THE BIGLOW PAPERS. 

of gabble. In these days, what with Town Meetings, 
School Committees, Boards (lumber) of one kind and 
another, Congresses, Parliaments, Diets, Indian Coun- 
cils, Palavers, and the like, there is scarce a village 
which has not its factories of this description driven 
by (milk-and-) water power. I cannot conceive the 
confusion of tongues to have been the curse of Babel, 
since I esteem my ignorance of other languages as a 
kind of Martello-tower, in which I am safe from the 
furious bombardments of foreign garrulity. For this 
reason I have ever preferred the study of the dead 
languages, those primitive formations being Ararats 
upon whose silent peaks I sit secure and watch this 
new deluge without fear, though it rain figures (sim- 
ulacra, semblances) of speech forty days and nights 
together, as it not uncommonly happens. Thus is my 
coat, as it were, without buttons by which any but a 
vernacular wild bore can seize me. Is it not possible 
that the Shakers may intend to convey a quiet re- 
proof and hint, in fastening their outer garments with 
hooks and eyes ? 

This reflection concerning Babel, which I find in no 
Commentary, was first thrown upon my mind when 
an excellent deacon of my congregation (being in- 
fected with the Second Advent delusion) assured me 
that he had received a first instalment of the gift of 
tongues as a small earnest of larger possessions in 
the like kind to follow. For, of a truth, I could not 
reconcile it with my ideas of the Divine justice and 
mercy that the single wall which protected people of 
other languages from the incursions of this otherwise 
well-meaning propagandist should be broken down. 

In reading Congressional debates, I have fancied, 



THE B I GLOW PAPERS. 107 

that, after the subsidence of those paiiiful buzzings in 
the brain which result from such exercises, I detected 
a slender residuum of valuable information. I made 
the discovery that nothing takes longer in the saying 
than anything else, for, as ex nihilo nihil Jit, so from 
one polypus nothing any number of similar ones may 
be produced. I would recommend to the attention 
of viva voce debaters and controversialists the admira- 
ble example of the monk Copres, who, in the fourth 
century, stood for half an hour in the midst of a great 
fire, and thereby silenced a Manichsean antagonist 
who had less of the salamander in him. As for those 
who quarrel in print, I have no concern with them 
here, since the eyelids are a divinely granted shield 
against all such. Moreover, I have observed in many 
modern books that the printed portion is becoming 
gradually smaller, and the number of blank or fly- 
leaves (as they are called) greater. Should this for- 
tunate tendency of literature continue, books will 
grow more valuable from year to year, and the whole 
Serbonian bog yield to the advances of firm arable 
land. 

I have wondered, in the Representatives' Chamber 
of our own Commonwealth, to mark how little im- 
pression seemed to be produced by that emblematic 
fish suspended over the heads of the members. Our 
wiser ancestors, no doubt, hung it there as being the 
animal which the Pythagoreans reverenced for its 
silence, and which certainly in that particular does 
not so well merit the epithet cold-blooded, by which 
naturalists distinguish it, as certain bipeds, afflicted 
with ditch-water on the brain, who take occasion to 
tap themselves in Fanueil Halls, meeting-houses, and 
other places of public resort.— H. W.J 



No. V. 
THE DEBATE IN THE SENNIT. 

SOT TO A NUSRY RHYME. 

[The incident which gave rise to the debate sati- 
rized in the following verses was the unsuccessful 
attempt of Drayton and Sayres to give freedom to 
seventy men and women, fellow-beings and fellow- 
Christians. Had Tripoli, instead of Washington, 
been the scene of this undertakmg, the unhappy 
leaders in it would have been as secure of the the- 
oretic as they now are of the practical part of mar- 
tyrdom. I question whether the Dey of Tripoli is 
blessed with a District Attorney so benighted as 
ours at the seat of government. Very fitly is he 
named Key, who would allow himself to be made 
the instrument of locking the door of hope against 
sufferers in such a cause. Not all the waters of the 
ocean can cleanse the vile smutch of the jailer's fin- 
gers from off that little Key. Ahenea clavis, a bra- 
zen Key indeed ! 

Mr. Calhoun, who is made the chief speaker in this 
burlesque, seems to think that the light of the nine- 
teenth century is to be put out as soon as he tinkles 
his little cow-bell curfew. Whenever slavery is 
touched, he sets up his scarecrow of dissolving the 
Union. This may do for the North, but I should 
conjecture that something more than a pumpkin- 



THE BIGLOW PAPERS. 109 

lantern is required to scare manifest and irretriev- 
able Destiny out of her path. Mr. Calhoun cannot 
let go the apron-string of the Past. The Past is a 
good nurse, but we must be weaned from her sooner 
or later, even though, like Plotinus, we should run 
home from school to ask the breast, after we are 
tolerably well-grown youths. It will not do for us 
to hide our faces in her lap, whenever the strange 
Future holds out her arms and asks us to come to 
her. 

But we are all alike. We have all heard it said, 
often enough, that little boys must not play with 
fire ; and yet, if the matches be taken away from us 
and put out of reach upon the shelf, we must needs 
get into our little corner, and scowl and stamp and 
threaten the dire revenge of going to bed without 
our supper. The world shall stop till we get our 
dangerous plaything again. Dame Earth, mean- 
while, who has more than enough household matters 
to mind, goes bustling hither and thither as a hiss or 
a sputter tells her that this or that kettle of hers is 
boiling over, and before bedtime we are glad to eat 
our porridge cold, and gulp down our dignity along 
with it. 

Mr. Calhoun has somehow acquired the name of a 
great statesman, and, if it be great statesmanship to 
put lance in rest and run a tilt at the Spirit of the 
Age with the certainty of being next moment hurled 
neck and heels into the dust amid universal laugh- 
ter, he deserves the title. He is the Sir Kay of our 
modern chivalry. He should remember the old 
Scandinavian mythus. Thor was the strongest of 
gods, but he could not wrestle with Time, nor so 



110 THE B I GLOW PAPERS. 

much as lift up a fold of the great snake wluch knit 
the universe together ; and when he smote the 
Earth, though with his terrible mallet, it was but as 
if a leaf had fallen. Yet all the while it semed to 
Thor that he had only been wrestling with an old 
woman, striving to lift a eat, and striking a stupid 
giant on the head. 

And in old times, doubtless, the giants were stupid, 
and there was no better sport for the Sir Launcelots 
and Sir Gawains than to go about cutting off their 
great blundering heads with enchanted swords. But 
things have wonderfully changed. It is the giants, 
nowadays, that have the science and the intelli- 
gence, while the chivalrous Don Quixotes of Conser- 
vatism still cumber themselves with the clumsy armor 
of a bygone age. On whirls the restless globe through 
unsounded time, with its cities and its silences, its 
births and funerals, half light, half shade, but never 
wholly dark, and sure to swing round into the happy 
morning at last. With an involuntary smile, one 
sees Mr. Calhoun letting slip his pack-thread cable 
with a crooked pin at the end of it to anchor South 
Carolina upon the bank and shoal of the Past. — H. 
W.] 

TO MK. BUCKENAM. 

MR. Editer, As i wuz kinder prunin 
round, in a little nussry sot out a year or 2 
a go, the Dbait in the sennit cum inter my 
mine An so i took & Sot it to wut I call a 
nussry rime. I hev made sum onnable 
Gentlemun speak that dident speak in a 



THE B J GLOW PAPERS. Ill 

Kind uv Poetikul lie sense the seeson is 
dreffle backerd up This way 
ewers as ushul 

HOSEA BIGLOW. 

" Here we stan' on the Constitution, by thun- 
der ! 
It 's a fact o' wich ther 's bushils o' proofs ; 
Fer how coukl we trample on 't so, I wonder, 
Ef 't wor n't thet it 's oilers under our hoofs ? " 
Sez John C. Calhoun, sez he ; 
" Human rights haint no more 
Right to come on this floor, 
No more 'n the man in the moon," sez he. 

"The North haint no kind o' bisness wdth 
nothin'. 
An' you 've no idee how much bother it saves ; 
We aint none riled by their frettin' an' frothin', 
We 're used to layin' the string on our slaves," 
Sez John C. Calhoun, sez he ; — 
Sez Mister Foote, 
" I should like to shoot 
The holl gang, by the gret horn spoon ! " 
sez he. 

" Freedom's Keystone is Slavery, thet ther 's no 
doubt on. 
It 's sutthin' thet 's — wha' d' ye call it ? — 



112 TBE B I GLOW PAPERS. 

An' the slaves thet we oilers make the most out 
on 
Air them north o' Mason an' Dixon's line," 
Sez John C. Calhoun, sez he ; — 
" Fer all thet," sez Mangum, 
" 'T would be better to hang 'em, 
An' so get red on 'em soon," sez he. 

" The mass ough' to labor an' we lay on soffies, 
Thet 's the reason I want to spread Freedom's 
aree ; 
It puts all the cunninest on us in office. 
An' reelises our Maker's orig'nal idee," 
Sez John C. Calhoun, sez he ; — 
" Thet 's ez plain," sez Cass, 
" Ez thet some one 's an ass, 
It 's ez clear ez the sun is at noon," sez he. 

" Now don't go to say I 'm the friend of oppres- 
sion, 
But keep all your spare breath fer coolin' your 
broth ; 
Fer I oilers hev strove (at least thet 's my im- 
pression) 
To make cussed free with the rights o' the 
North." 
Sez John C. Calhoun, sez he ; — 
" Yes," sez Davis o' Miss., 
" The perfection o' bliss 
Is in skinnin' thet same old coon," sez he. 



thf: b I glow papers. 113 

" Slavery 's a thing thet depends on complexion, 
It 's God's law thet fetters on black skins don't 
chafe ; 
Ef brains wuz to settle it (horrid reflection !) 
Wich of our onnable body 'd be safe ? " 
Sez John C. Calhoun, sez he ; — 
Sez Mister Hannegan, 
Afore he began agin, 
" Thet exception is quite oppertoon," sez he. 

" Gen'nle Cass, Sir, you need n't be twitchin' 
your collar, 
Yoicr merit 's quite clear by the dut on your 
knees. 
At the North we don't make no distinctions o* 
color ; 
You can all take a lick at our shoes wen you 
please," 
Sez John C. Calhoun, sez he ; — 
Sez Mister Jarnagin, 
" They wunt hev to larn agin. 
They all on 'em know the old toon," sez he. 

" The slavery question aint no ways bewilderin'. 
North an' South hev one int'rest, it 's plain to 
a glance, 
No'thern men, like us patriarchs, don't sell their 
childrin, 
But they du sell themselves, ef they git a good 
chance," 



114 THE B I GLOW PAPERS. 

Sez John C. Calhoun, sez he ; — 

Sez Atherton here, 

" This is gittin' severe, 
I wish I could dive like a loon," sez he. 

" It '11 break up the Union, this talk about free- 
dom, 
An' your f act'ry gals (soon ez we split) '11 make 
head. 
An' gittin' some Miss chief or other to lead 'em, 
'11 go to work raisin' promiscoous Ned," 
Sez John C. Calhoun, sez he ; — 
" Yes, the North," sez Colquitt, 
" Ef we Southerners all quit. 
Would go down like a busted balloon," sez 
he. 

" Jest look wut is doin', wut annyky's brewin' 
In the beautiful clime o' the olive an' vine. 
All the wise aristoxy is tumblin' to ruin, 

An' the sankylots drorin' an' drinkin their 
wine," 
Sez John C. Calhoun, sez he, — 
" Yes," sez Johnson, " in France 
They 're beginnin' to dance 
Beelzebub's own rigadoon," sez he. 

" The South 's safe enough, it don't feel a mite 
skeery. 
Our slaves in their darkness an' dut air tu blest 



THE BIGLOW PAPERS. 115 

Not tu welcome with proud hallylugers the ery 
Wen our eagle kicks yourn from the naytional 
nest," 
Sez John C. Calhoun, sez he ; — 
" 0," sez Westcott o' Florida, 
" Wut treason is horrider 
Then our priv'leges tryin' to proon ? " sez he. 

" It 's 'coz they 're so happy, thet wen crazy sar- 
pints 
Stick their nose in our bizness, we git so 
darned riled 
We tliink it 's our dooty to give pooty sharp hints, 
Thet the last crumb of Edin on airth shan't 
be spiled 
Sez John C. Calhoun, sez he ; — 
*'Ah," sez Dixon H. Lewis, 
*' It perfectly true is 
Thet slavery 's airth's grettest boon," sez he. 

[It was said of old time, that riches have wings ; 
and, though this be not applicable in a literal strict- 
ness to the wealth of our patriarchal brethren of the 
South, yet it is clear that their possessions have legs, 
and an unaccountable propensity for using them in a 
northerly direction. I marvel that the grand jury 
of Washington did not find a true bill against the 
North Star for aiding and abetting Drayton and 
Sayres. It would have been quite of a piece with 
the intelligence displayed by the South on other 
questions connected with slavery. I think that no 



116 THE BIG LOW PAPERS. 

ship of state was ever freighted with a more veritable 
Jonah than this same domestic institution of ours. 
Mephistopheles himself could not feign so bitterly, so 
satirically sad a sight as this of three millions of 
human beings crushed beyond help or hope by this 
one mighty argument, — Our fathers knew no better ! 
Nevertheless, it is the unavoidable destiny of Jonahs 
to be cast overboard sooner or later. Or shall we try 
the experiment of hiding our Jonah in a safe place, 
that none may lay hands on him to make jetsam of 
him ? Let us, then, with equal forethought and wis- 
dom, lash ourselves to the anchor, and await, in pious 
confidence, the certain result. Perhaps our suspicious 
passenger is no Jonah after all, being black. For it 
is well known that a superintending Providence made 
a kind of sandwich of Ham and his descendants, to 
be devoured by the Caucasian race. 

In God's name, let all, who hear nearer and nearer 
the hungry moan of the storm and the growl of the 
breakers, speak out ! But, alas ! we have no right 
to interfere. If a man pluck an apple of mine, he 
shall be in danger of the justice ; but if he steal my 
brother, I must be silent. Who says this ? Our 
Constitution, consecrated by the callous suetude of 
sixty years, and grasped in triumphant argument in 
the left hand of him whose right hand clutches the 
clotted slave-whip. Justice, venerable with the un- 
dethronable majesty of countless aeons, says, — 
Speak ! The Past, wise with the sorrows and desola- 
tions of ages, from amid her shattered fanes and 
wolf -housing palaces, echoes, — Speak ! Nature, 
through her thousand trumpets of freedom, her stars, 
her sunrises, her seas, her winds, her cataracts, her 



THE BIGLOW PAPERS. 117 

mountains blue with cloudy pines, blows jubilant 
encouragement, and cries, — Speak ! From the 
soul's trembling abysses the still, small voice not 
vaguely murmurs, — Speak ! But, alas ! the Consti- 
tution and the Honorable Mr. Bagowind, M. C, say, 
— Be dumb ! 

It occurs to me to suggest, as a topic of inquiry in 
this connection, whether, on that momentous occasion 
when the goats and the sheep shall be parted, the 
Constitution and the Honorable Mr. Bagowind, M. 
C, will be expected to take their places on the left 
as our hircine vicars. 

Quid sum miser tunc dicturus? 
Quem patronum rogaturus f 

There is a point where toleration sinks into sheer 
baseness and poltroonery. The toleration of the 
worst leads us to look on what is barely better as 
good enough, and to worship what is only moderately 
good. Woe to that man, or that nation, to whom 
mediocrity has become an ideal ! 

Has our experiment of self-government succeeded, 
if it barely manage to rub and go ? Here, now, is a 
piece of barbarism which Christ and the nineteenth 
century say shall cease, and which Messrs. Smith, 
Brown, and others say shall not cease. I would by 
no means deny the eminent respectability of these 
gentlemen, but I confess, that, in such a wrestling- 
match, I cannot help having my fears for them. 
Discitejustitiam, moniti, et non temnere divos. 

H. W.] 



No. VI. 

THE PIOUS EDITOR'S CREED. 

[At the special instance of Mr. Biglow, I preface 
the following satire with an extract from a sermon 
preached during the past summer, from Ezekiel xxxiv. 
2 : " Son of man, prophesy against the shepherds 
of Israel." Since the Sabbath on which this discourse 
was delivered, the editor of the " Jaalam Indepen- 
dent Blunderbuss " has unaccountably absented him- 
self from our house of worship. 

" I know of no so responsible position as that of the 
public journalist. The editor of our day bears the 
same relation to his time that the clerk bore to the 
age before the invention of printing. Indeed, the 
position which he holds is that which the clergyman 
should hold even now. But the clergyman chooses 
to walk off to the extreme edge of the world, and to 
throw such seed as he has clear over into that dark- 
ness which he calls the Next Life. As if next did 
not mean nearest, and as if any life were nearer than 
that immediately present one which boils and eddies 
all around him at the caucus, the ratification meeting, 
and the polls ! Who taught him to exhort men to 
prepare for eternity, as for some future era of which 
the present forms no integral part ? The furrow 
which Time is even now turning runs through the 



THE BIGLOW PAPERS. 119 

Everlasting, and in that must he plant, or nowhere. 
Yet he would fain believe and teach that we are 
going to have more of eternity than we have now. 
This going of his is like that of the auctioneer, on 
which gone follows before we have made up our 
minds to bid, — in which manner, not three months 
back, I lost an excellent copy of Chappelow on Job. 
So it has come to pass that the preacher, instead of 
being a living force, has faded into an emblematic 
figure at christenings, weddings, and funerals. Or, 
if he exercise any other function, it is as keeper and 
feeder of certain theologic dogmas, which, when oc- 
casion offers, he unkennels with a stahoy ! " to bark 
and bite as 'tis their nature to," whence that re- 
proach of odium iheologicum has arisen. 

" Meanwhile, see what a pulpit the editor mounts 
daily, sometimes with a congregation of fifty thou- 
sand within reach of his voice, and never so much as 
a nodder, even, among them ! And from what a 
Bible can he choose his text, — a Bible which needs 
no translation, and which no priestcraft can shut and 
clasp from the laity, — the open volume of the world, 
upon which, with a pen of sunshine or destroying fire, 
the inspired Present is even now writing the annals 
of God ! Methinks the editor who should understand 
his calling, and be equal thereto, would truly deserve 
that title of iroifi^v \au>v, wliich Homer bestows upon 
princes. He would be the Moses of our nineteenth 
century, and whereas the old Sinai, silent now, is but 
a common mountain stared at by the elegant tourist 
and crawled over by the hammering geologist, he 
must find his tables of the new law here among fac- 
tories and cities in this Wilderness of Sin (Numbers 



120 THE BIGLOW PAPERS. 



iii. 12) called Progress of Civilization, and be the 
captain of our Exodus into the Canaan of a truer 
social order. 

" Nevertheless, our editor will not come so far 
within even the shadow of Sinai as Mahomet did, but 
chooses rather to construe Moses by Joe Smith. He 
takes up the crook, not that the sheep may be fed, 
but that he may never want a warm woollen suit and 
a joint of mutton. 

Immemor^ 0, Jidei, pecorumque ohlite tuorum ! 

For which reason I would derive the name editor not 
so much from edo, to publish, as from edo, to eat, that 
being the peculiar profession to which he esteems 
himself called. He blows up the flames of political 
discord for no other occasion than that he may thereby 
handily boil his own pot. I believe there are two 
thousand of these mutton-loving shepherds in the 
United States, and of these, how many have even the 
dimmest perception of their immense power, and the 
duties consequent thereon ? Here and there, haply, 
one. Nine hundred and ninety-nine labor to impress 
upon the people the great principles of Tiueedledum, 
and other nine hundred and ninety-nine preach with 
equal earnestness the gospel according to Tweedledee." 
— H. W.] 

I Du believe in Freedom's cause, 

Ez fur away ez Paris is ; 
I love to see her stick her claws 

In them infarnal Pharisees ; 
It 's wal enough agin a king 

To dror resolves an' triggers, — 



THE BIGLOW PAPERS. 121 

But libbaty 's a kind o' thing 
Tliet don't agree with niggers. 

I du believe the people want 

A tax on teas an' coffees, 
Thet nothin' aint extravygunt, — 

Purvidin' I 'm in office ; 
Fer I hev loved my country sence 

My eye-teeth filled their sockets, 
An' Uncle Sam I reverence, 

Partic'larly his pockets. 

I du believe in any plan 

O' levyin' the taxes, 
Ez long ez, like a lumberman, 

I git jest wut I axes : 
I go free-trade thru thick an' thin. 

Because it kind o' rouses 
The folks to vote, — an' keeps us in 

Our quiet custom-houses. 

I du believe it 's wise an' good 

To sen' out furrin missions, 
Thet is, on sartin understood 

An' orthydox conditions ; — 
I mean nine thousan' dolls, per ann., 

Nine thousan' more fer outfit, 
An' me to recommend a man 

The place 'ould jest about fit. 



122 THE BIGLOW PAPERS. 

I du believe in special ways 

O' prayin' an' convartin' ; 
The bread comes back in many days, 

An' buttered, tu, f er sartin ; — 
I mean in preyin' till one busts 

On wut the party chooses. 
An' in convartin' public trusts 

To very privit uses. 

I du believe hard coin the stuff 

Fer 'lectioneers to spout on ; 
The people 's oilers soft enough 

To make hard money out on ; 
Dear Uncle Sam pervides fer his, 

An' gives a good-sized junk to all, - 
I don't care how hard money is, 

Ez long ez mine 's paid punctooal. 

I du believe with all my soul 

In the gret Press's freedom. 
To pint the people to the goal 

An' in the traces lead 'em ; 
Palsied the arm thet forges yokes 

At my fat contracts squintin'. 
An' withered be the nose thet pokes 

Inter the gov'ment printin' ! 

I du believe thet I should give 
Wut 's his'n unto Caesar, 



THE B I GLOW PAPERS. 123 

Fer it 's by him I move an' live, 

Frum him my bread an' cheese air ; 

I clu believe thet all o' me 

Doth bear his souperscription, — 

Will, conscience, honor, honesty. 
An' things o' thet description. 

I du believe in prayer an' praise 

To him thet hez the grantin' 
O' jobs, — in every thin' thet pays. 

But most of all in Cantin' ; 
This doth my cup with marcies fill. 

This lays all thought o' sin to rest, — 
I don't believe in princerple, 

But, O, I du in interest. 

I du believe in bein' this 

Or thet, ez it may happen 
One vray or t' other hendiest is 

To ketch the people nappin' ; 
It aint by princerples nor men 

My preudunt course is steadied, — 
I scent wich pays the best, an' then 

Go into it baldheaded. 

I du believe thet holdin' slaves 

Comes nat'ral tu a Presidunt, 
Let 'lone the rowdedow it saves 

To hev a wal-broke precedunt ; 



124 THE BIGLOW PAPERS. 

Fer any office, small or gret, 

I could n't ax with no face, 
Without I 'd ben, thru dry an' wet, 

Th' unrizzest kind o' doughface. 

I du believe wutever trash 

'11 keep the people in blindness, — 
Thet we the Mexicuns can thrash 

Right inter brotherly kindness, 
Thet bombshells, grape, an' powder 'n' ball 

Air good-will's strongest magnets, 
Thet peace, to make it stick at all, 

Must be druv in with bagnets. 

In short, I firmly du believe 

In Humbug generally, 
Fer it 's a thing thet I perceive 

To hev a solid vally ; 
This heth my faithful shepherd ben, 

In pasturs sweet heth led me. 
An' this '11 keep the people green 

To feed ez they hev fed me. 

[I subjoin here another passage from my before- 
mentioned discourse. 

" Wonderful, to him that has eyes to see it rightly, 
is the newspaper. To me, for example, sitting on 
the critical front bench of the pit, in my study here 
in Jaalam, the advent of my weekly journal is as 
that of a strolling theatre, or rather of a puppet- 



THE BIG LOW PAPERS. 125 

show, on whose stage, narrow as it is, the tragedy, 
comedy, and farce of life are played in little. Be- 
hold the whole huge earth sent to me hebdomadally 
in a brown-paper wrapper ! 

" Hither, to my obscure corner, by wind or steam, 
on horse-back, or dromedary-back, in the pouch of 
the Indian runner, or clicking over the magnetic 
wires, troop all the famous performers from the four 
quarters of the globe. Looked at from a point of 
criticism, tiny puppets they seem all, as the • editor 
sets up his booth upon my desk and officiates as 
showman. Now I can truly see how little and tran- 
sitory is life. The earth appears almost as a drop 
of vinegar, on wliich the solar microscope of the im- 
agination must be brought to bear in order to make 
out anything distinctly. That animalcule there, in 
the pea-jacket, is Louis Philippe, just landed on the 
coast of England. That other, in the gray sur- 
tout and cocked hat, is Napoleon Bonaparte Smith, 
assuring France that she need apprehend no inter- 
ference from him in the present alarming juncture. 
At that spot, where you seem to see a speck of 
something in motion, is an immense mass-meeting. 
Look sharper, and you will see a mite brandishing 
his mandibles in an excited manner. That is the 
great Mr. Soandso, defining his position amid tumul- 
tuous and irrepressible cheers. That infinitesimal 
creature, upon whom some score of others, as minute 
as he, are gazing in open-mouthed admiration, is a 
famous philosopher, expoundmg to a select audience 
their capacity for the Infinite. That scarce discern- 
ible pufflet of smoke and dust is a revolution. That 
speck there is a reformer, just arranging the lever 



126 THE BIG LOW PAPERS. 

with whicli he is to move the world. And lo, there 
creeps forward the shadow of a skeleton that blows 
one breath between its grinning teeth, and all our 
distinguished actors are whisked off the slippery- 
stage into the dark Beyond. 

" Yes, the little show-box has its solemner sugges- 
tions. Now and then we catch a glimpse of a grim 
old man, who lays down a scythe and hour-glass in 
the corner while he shifts the scenes. There, too, 
in the dim back-ground, a weird shape is ever delv- 
ing. Sometimes he leans upon his mattock, and 
gazes, as a coach whirls by, bearing the newly mar- 
ried on their wedding jaunt, or glances carelessly 
at a babe brought home from christening. Sud- 
denly (for the scene grows larger and larger as we 
look) a bony hand snatches back a performer in the 
midst of his part, and him, whom yesterday two in- 
finities (past and future) would not suffice, a handful 
of dust is enough to cover and silence forever. Nay, 
we see the same fleshless fingers opening to clutch 
the showman himself, and guess, not without a shud- 
der, that they are lying in wait for spectator also. 

" Think of it : for three dollars a year I buy a 
season-ticket to this great Globe Theatre, for which 
God would write the dramas (only that we like 
farces, spectacles, and the tragedies of Apollyon 
better), whose scene-shifter is Time, and whose cur- 
tain is rung down by Death. 

" Such thoughts will occur to me sometimes as I 
am tearing off the wrapper of my newspaper. Then 
suddenly that otherwise too often vacant sheet be- 
comes invested for me with a strange kind of awe. 
Look ! deaths and marriages, notices of inventions, 



THE BIGLOW PAPERS. 127 

discoveries, and books, lists of promotions, of killed, 
wounded, and missing, news of fires, accidents, of 
sudden wealth and as sudden poverty ; — I hold in 
my hand the ends of myriad invisible electric con- 
ductors, along which tremble the joys, sorrows, 
wrongs, triumphs, hopes, and despairs of as many 
men and women everywhere. So that upon that 
mood of mind which seems to isolate me from man- 
kind as a spectator of their puppet-pranks, another 
supervenes, in which I feel that I, too, unknown and 
unheard of, am yet of some import to my fellows. 
For, through my newspaper here, do not families 
take pains to send me, an entire stranger, news of a 
death among them ? Are not here two who would 
have me know of their marriage ? And, strangest 
of all, is not this singular person anxious to have me 
informed that he has received a fresh supply of 
Dimitry Bruisgins ? But to none of us does the 
Present (even if for a moment discerned as such) con- 
tinue miraculous. We glance carelessly at the sun- 
rise, and get used to Orion and the Pleiades. The 
wonder wears off, and to-morrow this sheet, in which 
a vision was let down to me from Heaven, shall be 
the wrappage to a bar of soap or the platter for a 
beggar's broken victuals." — H. W.] 



No. VII. 
A LETTER 

FROM A CANDIDATE FOR THE PRESIDENCY IN AN- 
SWER TO SUTTIN QUESTIONS PROPOSED BY MR. 
HOSEA BIGLOW, INCLOSED IN A NOTE FROM MR. 
BIGLOW TO S. H. GAY, ESQ., EDITOR OF THE 
NATIONAL ANTI-SLAVERY STANDARD. 

[Curiosity may be said to be tbe quality wbieh 
preeminently distinguishes and segregates man from 
the lower animals. As we trace the scale of ani- 
mated nature downward, we find this faculty of the 
mind (as it may truly be called) dimiaished in the 
savage, and quite extinct in the brute. The first ob- 
ject which civilized man proposes to himself I take 
to be the finding out whatsoever he can concerning 
his neighbors. Nihil humanum a me alienum puto; I 
am curious even about John Smith. The desire next 
in strength to this (an opposite pole, indeed, of the 
same magnet) is that of communicating intelligence. 

Men in general may be divided into the inquisitive 
and the communicative. To the first class belong 
Peeping Toms, eaves-droppers, navel-contemplating 
Brahmins, metaphysicians, travellers, Empedocleses, 
spies, the various societies for promoting Rhino- 
thism, Columbuses, Yankees, discoverers, and men of 
science, who present themselves to the mind as so 
many marks of interrogation wandering up and down 



THE BIGLOW PAPERS. 129 

the world, or sitting in studies and laboratories. The 
second class I should again subdivide into four. In 
the first subdivision I would rank those who have an 
itch to tell us about themselves, — as keepers of 
diaries, insignificant persons generally, Montaignes, 
Horace Walpoles, autobiographers, poets. The sec- 
ond includes those who are anxious to impart infor- 
mation concerning other people, — as historians, bar- 
bers, and such. To the third belong those who labor 
to give us intelligence about nothing at all, — as nov- 
elists, political orators, the large majority of authors, 
preachers, lecturers, and the like. In the fourth 
come those who are communicative from motives of 
public benevolence, — as finders of mares'-nests and 
bringers of ill news. Each of us two-legged fowls 
without feathers embraces all these subdivisions in 
himself to a greater or less degree, for none of us so 
much as lays an egg, or incubates a chalk one, but 
straightway the whole barn-yard shall know it by 
our cackle or our cluck. Omnibus hoc vitium est. 
There are different grades in all these classes. One 
will turn his telescope toward a back-yard, another 
toward Uranus ; one will tell you that he dined with 
Smith, another that he supped with Plato. In one 
particular, all men may be considered as belonging to 
the first grand division, inasmuch as they all seem 
equally desirous of discovering the mote in their 
neighbor's eye. 

To one or another of these species every human 
being may safely be referred. I think it beyond a 
peradventure that Jonah prosecuted some inquiries 
into the digestive apparatus of whales, and that Noah 
sealed up a letter in an empty bottle, that news in 



130 THE B I GLOW PAPERS. 

regard to him might not be wanting in case of the 
worst. They had else been super or subter human. 
I conceive, also, that, as there are certain persons 
who continually peep and pry at the key-hole of that 
mysterious door through which, sooner or later, we 
all make our exits, so there are doubtless ghosts fidg- 
eting and fretting on the other side of it, because they 
have no means of conveying back to the world the 
scraps of news they have picked up. For there is an 
answer ready somewhere to every question, the great 
law of give and take runs through all nature, and if 
we see a hook, we may be sure that an eye is waiting 
for it. I read in every face I meet a standing adver- 
tisement of uiformation wanted in regard to A. B., 
or that the friends of CD. can hear of him by appli- 
cation to such a one. 

It was to gratify the two great passions of asking 
and answering that epistolary correspondence was 
first invented. Letters (for by this usurped title 
epistles are now commonly known) are of several 
kinds. First, there are those which are not letters at 
all, — as letters patent, letters dimissory, letters in- 
closing bills, letters of administration, Pliny's letters, 
letters of diplomacy, of Cato, of Mentor, of Lords 
Lyttelton, Chesterfield, and Orrery, of Jacob Beh- 
men, Seneca (whom St. Jerome includes in his list of 
sacred writers), letters from abroad, from sons in col- 
lege to their fathers, letters of marque, and letters 
generally, which are in no wise letters of mark. 
Second, are real letters, such as those of Gray, Cow- 
per, Walpole, Howel, Lamb, the first letters from 
children (printed in staggering capitals). Letters 
from New York, letters of credit, and others, inter- 



THE BIGLOW PAPERS. 131 

esting for the sake of the writer or the thing written. 
I have read also letters from Europe by a gentle- 
man named Pinto, containing some curious gossip, 
and which I hope to see collected for the benefit of 
the curious. There are, besides, letters addressed 
to posterity, — as epitaphs, for example, written for 
their own monuments by monarchs, whereby we have 
lately become possessed of the names of several great 
conquerors and kings of kings, hitherto unheard of 
and still impronounceable, but valuable to the stu- 
dent of the entirely dark ages. The letter wliich St. 
Peter sent to King Pepin in the year of grace 755 I 
would place in a class by itself, as also the letters of 
candidates, concerning which I shall dilate more fully 
in a note at the end of the following poem. At pres- 
ent, sat prata hiberunt. Only, concerning the shape 
of letters, they are all either square or oblong, to 
which general figures circular letters and round- 
robins also conform themselves. — H. W.] 

Deer sir its gut to be the fashun now to 
rite letters to the candid 8s and i wus chose 
at a publick Meetin in Jaalam to du wut 
wus nessary fur that town, i writ to 271 
ginerals and gut ansers to 209. tha air 
called candid 8s but I don't see nothin can- 
did about em. this here 1 wich I send wus 
thought satty's factory. I dunno as it's 
ushle to print Poscrips, but as all the ansers 
I got hed the saim, I sposed it wus best. 
times has gretly changed. Formerly to 



132 THE BIGLOW PAPERS. 

knock a man into a cocked liat wus to use 
him up, but now it only gives Mm a ckance 
fur the cheef madgustracy. — H. B. 

Dear Sir, — You wish to know my notions 

On sartin pints thet rile the land ; 
There 's nothin' thet my nature so shuns 

Ez bein' mum or underhand ; 
I 'm a straight-spoken kind o' creetur 

Thet blurts right out wut 's in his head, 
An' ef I 've one pecooler feetur, 

It is a nose thet wmit be led. 

So, to begin at the beginnin', 

An' come direcly to the pint, 
I think the country's imderpinnin' 

Is some consid'ble out o' jint ; 
I aint agoin' to try your patience 

By teUin' who done this or thet, 
I don't make no insinooations, 

I jest let on I smell a rat. 

Thet is, I mean, it seems to me so, 

But, ef the pubHc think I 'm wrong, 
I wunt deny but wut I be so, — 

An,' fact, it don't smeU very strong ; 
My mind 's tu fair to lose its balance 

An' say wich party hez most sense ; 
There may be folks o' greater talence 

Thet can't set stiddier on the fence. 



THE BIGLOW PAPERS. 133 

I 'm an eclectic ; ez to choosin' 

Twixt tliis an' thet, I 'm plaguy lawth ; 
I leave a side thet looks like losin', 

But (wile there 's doubt) I stick to both ; 
I Stan' upon the Constitution, 

Ez preudunt statesmun say, who 've planned 
A way to git the most profusion 

O' chances ez to ware they '11 stand. 

Ez f er the war, I go agin it, — 

I mean to say I kind o' du, — 
Thet is, I mean thet, bein' in it, 

The best way wuz to fight it thru ; 
Not but wut abstract war is horrid, 

I sign to thet with all my heart, — 
But civlyzation doos git forrid 

Sometimes upon a powder-cart. 

About thet darned Proviso matter 

I never hed a grain o' doubt, 
Nor I aint one my sense to scatter 

So 's no one could n't pick it out ; 
My love fer North an' South is equil, 

So I '11 jest answer plump an' frank, 
No matter wut may be the sequil, — 

Yes, Sir, I am agin a Bank. 

Ez to the answerin' o' questions, 

I 'm an off ox at bein' druv. 
Though I aint one thet ary test shuns 

'11 give our folks a helpin' shove ; 



134 THE B J GLOW PAPERS. 

Kind o' promiscoous I go it 

Fer the holl country, an' the ground 
I take, ez nigh ez I can show it, 

Is pooty gen' ally all round. 

I don't appruve o' givin' pledges ; 

You 'd ough' to leave a feUer free 
An' not go knockin' out the wedges 

To ketch his fingers in the tree ; 
Pledges air awfle breachy cattle 

Thet preudunt farmers don't turn out, 
Ez long 'z the people git their rattle, 

Wut is there fer 'm to grout about ? 

Ez to the slaves, there 's no confusion 

In my idees consarnin' them, — 
I think they air an Institution, 

A sort of — yes, jest so, ahem : 
Do I own any ? Of my merit 

On thet pint you yourself may jedge ; 
All is, I never drink no sperit, 

Nor I haint never signed no pledge. 

, Ez to my principles, I glory 

In hevin' nothin' o' the sort ; 
I aint a Wig, I aint a Tory, 

I 'm jest a candidate, in short ; 
Thet 's fair an' square an' parpendicler 

But, ef the Public cares a fig 
To hev me an' thin' in particler, 

Wy, I 'm a kind o' peri-wig. 



THE BIG LOW PAPERS. 135 



P. s. 

Ez we 're a sort o' privateerin', 

O' course, you know, it 's sheer an* sheer, 
An' there is sutthin' wuth your hearin' 

I '11 mention in your privit ear ; 
Ef you git me inside the White House, 

Your head with ile I '11 kin' o' 'nint 
By gittin' you inside the Light-house 

Down to the eend 'o Jaalam Pint. 

An' ez the North hez took to brustlin* 

At bein' scrouged frum off the roost, 
I 'U tell ye wut '11 save all tusslin' 

An' give our side a harnsome boost, — 
Tell 'em thet on the Slavery question 

I 'm RIGHT, although to speak I 'm lawth. 
This gives you a safe pint to rest on, 

An' leaves me frontin' South by North. 

[And now of epistles candidatial, which are of two 
kinds, — namely, letters of acceptance, and letters 
definitive of position. Our republic, on the eve of 
an election, may safely enough be called a republic 
of letters. Epistolary composition becomes then an 
epidemic, which seizes one candidate after another, 
not seldom cutting short the thread of political life. 
It has come to such a pass, that a party dreads less 
the attacks of its opponents than a letter from its 
candidate. Litera scripta manet, and it will go hard 



136 THE B I GLOW PAPERS. 

if something bad cannot be made of it. General Har- 
rison, it is well understood, was surrounded, during . 
his candidacy, with the cordon sanitaire of a vigilance 
committee. No prisoner in Spielberg was ever more 
cautiously deprived of writing materials. The soot 
was scraped carefully from the chimney-places ; out- 
posts of expert rifle-shooters rendered it sure death 
for any goose (who came clad in feathers) to ap- 
proach within a certain limited distance of North 
Bend ; and all domestic fowls about the premises 
were reduced to the condition of Plato's original 
man. By these precautions the General was saved. 
Parva componere magnis, I remember, that, when 
party-spirit once ran high among my people, upon 
occasion of the choice of a new deacon, I, having my 
preferences, yet not caring too openly to express 
them, made use of an innocent fraud to bring about 
the result which I deemed most desirable. My strat- 
agem was no other than the throwing a copy of the 
Complete Letter- Writer in the way of the candidate 
whom I wished to defeat. He caught the infection, 
and addressed a short note to his constituents, in 
which the opposite party detected so many and so 
grave improprieties (he had modelled it upon the let- 
ter of a young lady accepting a proposal of marriage), 
that he not only lost his election, but, falling under a 
suspicion of Sabellianism and I know not what (the 
widow Endive assured me that he was a Paralipome- 
non, to her certain knowledge), was forced to leave 
the town. Thus it is that the letter killeth. 

The object which candidates propose to themselves 
in writing is to convey no meaning at all. And here 
is a quite unsuspected pitfall into which they succes- 



THE BIGLOW PAPERS. 137 

sively pluDge headlong. For it is precisely in such 
cryptographies that mankind are prone to seek for 
and find a wonderful amount and variety of signifi- 
cance. Omne ignotum pro mirifico. How do we ad- 
mire at the antique world striving to crack those 
oracular nuts from Delphi, Hammon, and elsewhere, 
in only one of which can I so much as surmise that 
any kernel had ever lodged ; that, namely, wherein 
Apollo confessed that he was mortal. One Didynms 
is, moreover, related to have written six thousand 
books on the single subject of grammar, a topic ren- 
dered only more tenebrific by the labors of his succes- 
sors, and which seems still to possess an attraction 
for authors in proportion as they can make nothing 
of it. A singular loadstone for theologians, also, is 
the Beast in the Apocalypse, whereof, in the course 
of my studies, I have noted two hundred and three 
several interpretations, each lethiferal to all the rest. 
Non nostrum est tantas componere lites, yet I have my- 
self ventured upon a two hundred and fourth, which 
I embodied in a discourse preached on occasion of the 
demise of the late usurper, Napoleon Bonaparte, and 
which quieted, in a large measure, the minds of my 
people. It is true that my views on this important 
point were ardently controverted by Mr. Shearjashub 
Holden, the then preceptor of our academy, and in 
other particulars a very deserving and sensible young 
man, though possessing a somewhat limited knowl- 
edge of the Greek tongue. But liis heresy struck 
down no deep root, and, he having been lately re- 
moved by the hand of Providence, I had the satis- 
faction of reaffirming my cherished sentiments in a 
sermon preached upon the Lord's day immediately 



138 THE B I GLOW PAPERS. 

succeeding his funeral. This might seem like taking 
an unfair advantage, did I not add that he had made 
provision in his last will (being celibate) for the pub- 
lication of a posthumous tractate in support of his 
own dangerous opinions. 

I know of nothing in our modern times which ap- 
proaches so nearly to the ancient oracle as the letter 
of a Presidential candidate. Now, among the Greeks, 
the eating of beans was strictly forbidden to all such 
as had it in mind to consult those expert amphibolo- 
gists, and this same prohibition on the part of Py- 
thagoras to his disciples is understood to imply an 
abstinence from politics, beans having been used as 
ballots. That other explication, quod videlicet sensus 
eo cibo obtundi existimaret, though supported pugnis et 
calcibus by many of the learned, and not wanting the 
countenance of Cicero, is confuted by the larger ex- 
perience of New England. On the whole, I think it 
safer to apply here the rule of interpretation which 
now generally obtains in regard to antique cosmogo- 
nies, myths, fables, proverbial expressions, and knotty 
points generally, which is, to find a common-sense 
meaning, and then select whatever can be imagined 
the most opposite thereto. In this way we arrive at 
the conclusion, that the Greeks objected to the ques- 
tioning of candidates. And very properly, if, as I 
conceive, the chief point be not to discover what a 
person in that position is, or what he will do, but 
whether he can be elected. Vos exemplaria GrcBca 
nocturna versate manu, versate diurna. 

But, since an imitation of the Greeks in this par- 
ticular (the asking of questions being one chief privi- 
lege of freemen) is hardly to be hoped for, and our 



THE BIG LOW PAPERS. 139 

candidates will answer, whether they are questioned 
or not, I would recommend that these ante-election- 
ary dialogues should be carried on by symbols, as 
were the diplomatic correspondences of the Scythians 
and Macrobii, or confined to the language of signs, 
like the famous interview of Panurge and Goatsnose. 
A candidate might then convey a suitable reply to all 
committees of inquiry by closing one eye, or by pre- 
senting them with a phial of Egyptian darkness to be 
speculated upon by their respective constituencies. 
These answers would be susceptible of whatever re- 
trospective construction the exigencies of the politi- 
cal campaign might seem to demand, and the candi- 
date could take his position on either side of the fence 
with entire consistency. Or, if letters must be writ- 
ten, profitable use might be made of the Dighton 
rock hieroglyphic or the cuneiform script, every fresh 
decipherer of which is enabled to educe a different 
meaning, whereby a sculptured stone or two supplies 
us, and will probably continue to supply posterity, 
with a very vast and various body of authentic his- 
tory. For even the briefest epistle in the ordinary 
chirography is dangerous. There is scarce any style 
so compressed that superfluous words may not be 
detected in it. A severe critic might curtail that 
famous brevity of Caesar's by two thirds, drawing his 
pen through the supererogatory veni and vidi. Per- 
haps, after all, the surest footing of hope is to be 
found in the rapidly increasing tendency to demand 
less and less of qualification in candidates. Already 
have statesmanship, experience, and the possession 
(nay, the profession, even) of principles been rejected 
as superfluous, and may not the patriot reasonably 



140 THE BIGLOW PAPERS. 

hope tliat the ability to write will follow ? At pres- 
ent, there may be death in pot-hooks as well as pots, 
the loop of a letter may suffice for a bow-string, and 
all the dreadful heresies of Anti-slavery may lurk in 
a flourish. — H. W.] 



No. VIII. 

A SECOND LETTER FROM B. SAWIN, 
Esq. 

[In the following epistle, we behold Mr. Sawin 
returning, a miles emeritus, to the bosom of his family. 
Quantum mutatus ! The good Father of us all had 
doubtless intrusted to the keeping of this child of his 
certain faculties of a constructive kind. He had put 
in him a share of that vital force, the nicest economy 
of every minute atom of which is necessary to the 
perfect development of Humanity. He had given 
him a brain and heart, and so had equipped his soul 
with the two strong wings of knowledge and love, 
whereby it can mount to hang its nest under the eaves 
of heaven. And this child, so dowered, he had in- 
trusted to the keeping of his vicar, the State. How 
stands the account of that stewardship ? The State, 
or Society (call her by what name you will), had 
taken no manner of thought of him till she saw him 
swept out into the street, the pitiful leavings of last 
night's debauch, with cigar-ends, lemon-parings, to- 
bacco-quids, slops, vile stenches, and the whole loath- 
some next-morning of the bar-room, — an own child 
of the Almighty God ! I remember him as he was 
brought to be christened, a ruddy, rugged babe ; and 
now there he wallows, reeking, seething, — the dead 
corpse, not of a man, but of a soul, — a putrefying 



142 THE B I GLOW PAPERS. 

lump, horrible for the life that is in it. Comes the 
wind of heaven, that good Samaritan, and parts the 
hair upon his forehead, nor is too nice to kiss those 
parched, cracked lips ; the morning opens upon him 
her eyes full of pitying sunshine, the sky yearns down 
to him, — and there he lies fermenting. O sleep ! 
let me not profane thy holy name by calling that 
stertorous unconsciousness a slumber ! By and by 
comes along the State, God's vicar. Does she say, 
" My poor, forlorn foster-child ! Behold here a force 
which I will make dig and plant and build for me ? " 
Not so, but, " Here is a recruit ready-made to my 
hand, a piece of destroying energy lying unprofitably 
idle." So she claps an ugly gray suit on him, puts a 
musket in his grasp, and sends him off, with Guber- 
natorial and other godspeeds, to do duty as a de- 
stroyer. 

I made one of the crowd at the last Mechanics' 
Fair, and, with the rest, stood gazing in wonder at a 
perfect machine, with its soul of fire, its boiler-heart 
that sent the hot blood pulsing along the iron arteries, 
and its thews of steel. And while I was admiring the 
adaptation of means to end, the harmonious involu- 
tions of contrivance, and the never-bewildered com- 
plexity, I saw a grimed and greasy fellow, the im- 
perious engine's lackey and drudge, whose sole office 
was to let fall, at intervals, a drop or two of oil upon 
a certain joint. Then my soul said within me. See 
there a piece of mechanism to which that other you 
marvel at is but as the rude first effort of a child, — 
a force which not merely suffices to set a few wheels 
in motion, but which can send an impulse all through 
the infinite future, — a contrivance, not for turning 



THE BIG LOW PAPERS. 143 

out pins, or stitching button-holes, but for making 
Hamlets and Lears. And yet this thing of iron shall 
be housed, waited on, guarded from rust and dust, 
and it shall be a crime but so much as to scratch it 
with a pin ; while the other, with its fire of God in it, 
shall be buffeted hither and thither, and finally sent 
carefully a thousand miles to be the target for a 
Mexican cannon-ball. Unthrifty Mother State ! My 
heart burned within me for pity and indignation, and 
I renewed this covenant with my own soul, — In aliis 
mansuetus ero, at, in hlasphemiis contra Christum non 
ita.—U.W.-] 

I SPOSE you wonder ware I be ; I can't tell, fer 

the soul o' me, 
Exacly ware I be myself, — meanin' by tliet the 

holl o' me. 
Wen I left hum, I lied two legs, an' they worn't 

bad ones neither, 
(The scaliest trick they ever played wuz bringin' 

on me hither,) 
Now one on 'em 's I dunno ware ; — they thought 

I wuz adyin', 
An' sawed it off because they said 't wuz kin' o' 

mortifyin' ; 
I 'm willin' to believe it wuz, an' yit I don't see, 

nuther, 
Wy one should take to feelin' cheajD a minnit 

sooner 'n t' other, 
Sence both wuz equilly to blame ; but things is ez 

they be ; 



144 TEE B I GLOW PAPERS. 

It took on so they took it off, an' thet 's enough 

far me : 
There 's one good thing, though, to be said about 

my wooden new one, — 
The liquor can't git into it ez 't used to in the 

true one ; 
So it saves drink ; an' then, besides, a feller 

could n't beg 
A gretter blessin' then to hev one oilers sober 

peg; 

It 's true a chap 's in want o' two fer follerin' a 
drum. 

But all the march I 'm up to now is jest to King- 
dom Come. 

I 've lost one eye, but thet 's a loss it 's easy to 

supply 
Out o' the glory thet I 've gut, fer thet is all my 

eye; 
An' one is big enough, I guess, by diligently 

usin' it. 
To see aU I shall ever git by way o' pay fer 

losin' it ; 
Off'cers, I notice, who git paid fer all our thumps 

an' kickins, 
Du wal by keepin' single eyes arter the fattest 

pickins ; 
So, ez the eye 's put fairly out, I '11 larn to go 

without it, 
An' not allow myself to be no gret put out about 

it. 



THE BIGLOW PAPERS. 145 

Now, le' me see, that is n't all ; I used, 'fore 

leavin' Jaalam, 
To count things on my finger-eends, but sutthin' 

seems to ail 'em : 
Ware 's my left hand ? O, darn it, yes, I recollect 

wut 's come on 't ; 
I haint no left arm but my right, an' thet 's gut 

jest a thumb on 't ; 
It aint so hendy ez it \\aiz to cal'late a sum 

on 't. 
I 've hed some ribs broke, — six (I b'lieve), — 

I haint kep* no account on 'em ; 
"Wen pensions git to be the talk, I '11 settle the 

amount on 'em. 
An' now I 'm speakin' about ribs, it kin' o' brings 

to mind 
One thet I could n't never break, — the one I 

lef ' behind ; 
Ef you should see her, jest clear out the spout o' 

your invention 
An' pour the longest sweetnin' in about an an- 

nooal pension. 
An' kin' o' hint (in case, you know, the critter 

should refuse to be 
Consoled) I aint so 'xpensive now to keep ez wut 

I used to be ; 
There 's one arm less, ditto one eye, an' then the 

leg thet 's wooden 
Can be took off an' sot away wenever ther' s a 

puddin'. 



146 THE B I GLOW PAPERS. 

I spose you think I 'in comin' back ez opperlunt 

ez thunder, 
With shiploads o' gold images an' varus sorts o' 

plunder ; 
Wal, 'fore I vullinteered, I thought this country 

wuz a sort o' 
Canaan, a regl'ar Promised Land flowin' with 

rum an' water, 
Ware propaty growed up like time, without no 

cultivation, 
An' gold wuz dug ez taters be among our Yankee 

nation, 
Ware nateral advantages were pufficly amazin', 
Ware every rock there wuz about with precious 

stuns wuz blazin', 
Ware mill-sites filled the country up ez thick ez 

you could cram 'em. 
An' desput rivers run about abeggin' folks to 

dam 'em ; 
Then there were meetinhouses, tu, chockful o' 

gold an' silver 
Thet you could take, an' no one could n't hand 

ye in no bill f er ; — 
Thet 's wut I thought afore I went, thet 's wut 

them, fellers told us 
Thet stayed to hum an' speechified an' to the 

buzzards sold us ; 
I thought thet gold mines could be gut cheaper 

than china asters. 
An' see myself acomin' back like sixty Jacob 

Astors ; 



THE B I GLOW PAPERS. 147 

But sech idees soon melted down an' did n't 

leave a grease-spot ; 
I vow my holl sheer o' the spiles would n't come 

nigh a V spot ; 
Although, most anywares we 've ben, you need 

n't break no locks, 
Nor run no kin' o' risks, to fill your pocket full 

o' rocks. 
I guess I mentioned in my last some o' the 

nateral feeturs 
O' this all-fiered buggy hole in th' way o' awfle 

creeturs, 
But I fergut to name (new things to speak on so 

abounded) 
How one day you 'U most die o' thust, an' 'fore 

the next git drownded. 
The clyrait seems to me jest like a teapot made 

o' pewter 
Our Prudence hed, thet would n't pour (all she 

could du) to suit her ; 
Fust place the leaves 'ould choke the spout, so 's 

not a drop 'ould dreen out, 
Then Prude 'ould tip an' tip an' tip, till the holl 

kit bust clean out, 
The kiver-hinge-pin bein' lost, tea-leaves an' tea 

an' kiver 
'ould all come down kerstvosh I ez though the 

dam broke in a river. 
Jest so 't is here ; holl months there aint a day 

o' rainy weather, 



148 THE B I GLOW PAPERS. 

An' jest ez th' officers 'ould be alayin' heads to- 
gether 
Ez t' how they 'd mix their drink at sech a mil- 

ingtary deepot, — 
'T 'ould pour ez though the hd wuz off the ever- 

lastin' teapot. 
The cons'quence is, thet I shall take, wen I'm 

allowed to leave here, 
One piece o' propaty along, — an' thet 's the 

shakin' fever ; 
It 's reggilar employment, though, an' thet aint 

thought to harm one, 
Nor 't aint so tiresome ez it wuz with t' other leg 

an' arm on ; 
An' it 's a consolation, tu, although it doos n't 

pay, 

To hev it said you 're some gret shakes in any 

kin' of way. 
'T worn't very long, I tell ye wut, I thought o' 

fortin-makin', — 
One day a reg'lar shiver-de-freeze, an' next ez 

good ez bakin', — 
One day abrilin' in the sand, then smoth'rin' in 

the mashes, — 
Git up all sound, be put to bed a mess o' hacks 

an' smashes. 
But then, thinks I, at any rate there 's glory to 

be hed, — 
Thet 's an investment, arter all, thet may n't 

turn out so bad : 



THE B I GLOW PAPERS. 149 

But somehow, wen we 'd fit an' licked, I oilers 

found the thanks 
Gut kin' o' lodged afore they come ez low down 

ez the ranks ; 
The Gin'rals gut the biggest sheer, the Cunnles 

next an' so on, — 
We never gut a blasted mite o' glory ez I know 

on. 
An' spose we hed, I wonder how you 're goin' to 

contrive its 
Division so 's to give a piece to twenty thousand 

privits ; 
Ef you should multiply by ten the portion o' the 

brav'st one. 
You would n't git more 'n half enough to speak 

of on a grave-stun ; 
We git the licks, — we 're jest the grist thet 's 

put into War's hoppers ; 
Leftenants is the lowest grade thet helps pick up 

the coppers. 
It may suit folks thet go agin a body with a soul 

in 't, 
An' aint contented with a hide without a bagnet 

hole in 't ; 
But glory is a kin' o' thing / shan't pui'sue no 

fui^der, 
Coz thet 's the off'cers parquisite, — yourn 's on'y 
jest the murder. 

Wal, arter I gin glory up, thinks I at least 
there 's one 



150 THE BIGLOW PAPERS. 

Thing in the bills we aint hed yit, an' thet 's the 

GLOKIOUS FUN ; 

Ef once we git to Mexico, we fairly may persume 

we 
All day an' night shall revel in the halls o' Mon- 

tezumy. 
I '11 tell ye wut rny revels wuz, an' see how you 

would like 'em ; 
We never gut inside the hall : the nighest ever 

/come 
Wuz stan'in' sentry in the sun (an', fact, it seemed 

a cent'ry) 
A ketchin' smells o' biled an' roast thet come out 

thru the entry, 
An' hearin', ez I sweltered thru my passes an' 

repasses, 
A rat-tat-too o' knives an' forks, a clinkty-clink 

o' glasses : 
I can't tell off the bill o' fare the Gin'rals hed 

inside ; 
All I know is, thet out o' doors a pair o' soles 

wuz fried. 
An' not a hunderd miles away frum ware this 

child wuz posted, 
A Massachusetts citizen wuz baked an' biled an' 

roasted ; 
The on'y thing like revellin' thet ever come to 

me 
Wuz bein' routed out o' sleep by thet darned re- 

velee. 



THE BIGLOW PAPERS. 151 

They say the quai'rel 's settled now ; fer my part 

I 've some doubt on 't, 
'T '11 take more fish-skin than folks think to take 

the rile clean out on 't ; 
At any rate, I 'm so used up I can't do no more 

fightin, 
The on'y chance thet 's left to me is politics or 

writin' ; 
Now, ez the people 's gut to hev a milingtary 

man. 
An' I aint nothin' else jest now, I 've hit upon a 

plan ; 
The can'idatin' line, you know, 'ould suit me to 

aT, 
An' ef I lose, 't wunt hurt my ears to lodge an- 
other flea ; 
So I '11 set up ez can'idate fer any kin' o' office, 
(I mean fer any thet includes good easy-cheers 

an soffies ; 
Fer ez to runnin' fer a place ware work 's the 

time o' day. 
You know thet s' wut I never did, — except the 

other way ;) 
Ef it 's the Presidential cheer fer wich I 'd better 

run, 
Wut two legs anjrwares about could keep up with 

my one ? 
There aint no kin' o' quality in can'idates, it 's 

said, 
So useful ez a wooden leg, — except a wooden 

head ; 



152 THE B I GLOW PAPERS. 

There 's nothin' aint so poppylar — (wy, it 's a 

parfect sin 
To think wut Mexico hez paid fer Santy Anny's 

pin ;) — 
Then I haint gut no principles, an', sence I wuz 

knee-high, 
I never did hev any gret, ez you can testify ; 
I 'm a decided peace-man, tu, an' go agin the 

war, — 
Fer now the holl on 't 's gone an' past, wut is 

there to go for ? 
Ef, wile you 're 'lectioneerin' round, some curus 

chaps should beg 
To know my views o' state affairs, jest answer 

WOODEN LEG ! 

Ef they aint settisfied with thet, an' kin' o' pry 

an' doubt 
An' ax fer sutthin' deffynit, jest say one eye 

PUT OUT ! 

Thet kin' o' talk I guess you '11 find '11 answer 

to a charm, 
An wen you 're druv tu nigh the wall, hoi' up my 

missin' arm ; 
Ef they should nose round fer a pledge, put on a 

vartoous look 
An' tell 'em thet 's percisely wut I never gin nor 

— took ! 

Then you can call me " Timbertoes," — thet 's 
wut the people likes ; 



THE BIGLOiv PAPERS. 153 

Sutthin' combinin' morril truth with phrases sech 

ez strikes ; 
Some say the people 's fond o' this, or thet, or 

wut you please, — 
I tell ye wut the people want is jest correct 

idees ; 
" Old Timbertoes," you see, 's a creed it 's safe 

to be quite bold on, 
There 's nothin' in 't the other side can any ways 

git hold on ; 
It 's a good tangible idee, a sutthin' to embody 
Thet valooable class o' men who look thru bran- 
dy toddy ; 
It gives a Party Platform, tu, jest level with the 

mind 
Of aU right-thinkin', honest folks thet mean to 

go it blind ; 
Then there air other good hooraws to dror on ez 

you need 'em, 
Sech ez the one-eyed Slarterer, the bloody 

BiRDOFREDUM ; 

Them 's wut takes hold o' folks thet think, ez 

well ez o' the masses, 
An' makes you sartin o' the aid o' good men of 

aU classes. 

There 's one thing I 'm in doubt about, in order 

to be Presidunt, 
It 's absolutely ne'ssary to be a Southern residunt ; 
The Constitution settles thet, an' also thet a feller 



154 THE BIGLO W PAPERS. 

Must own a nigger o' some sort, jet black, or 
brown, or yeller. 

Now I haint no objections agin particklar climes, 

Nor agin ownin' anythin' (except the truth some- 
times). 

But, ez I haint no capital, up there among ye, 
may be. 

You might raise funds enough fer me to buy a 
low-priced baby. 

An' then, to suit the No'thern folks, who feel 

obleeged to say 
They hate an' cuss the very thing they vote fer 

every day, 
Say you 're assured I go full butt fer Libbaty's 

diffusion 
An' made the purchis on'y jest to spite the In- 

stitootion ; — 
But, golly ! there 's the currier's hoss upon the 

pavement pawin' ! 
I '11 be more 'xplicit in my next. 
Yourn, 
BIRDOFREDOM SAWIN. 



[We have now a tolerably fair chance of estimat- 
ing how the balance-sheet stands between our re- 
turned volunteer and glory. Supposing the entries 
to be set down on both sides of the account in frac- 
tional parts of one hundred, we shall arrive at some- 
thing like the following result ; — » 



THE BIG LOW PAPERS. 



155 



Cr. B. Sawin, Esq 
By loss of one leg . . 20 
" do. one arm . 15 
" do. four fingers . 5 
*' do. one eye . 10 

" the breaking of six ribs 6 
" having served under 
Colonel Gushing one 
month . . .44 



in account with (Blank) Glory. Dr 
To one 675th three cheers 
in Faneuil Hall . 
" do. do. on 

occasion of presentation 
of sword to Colonel 
Wright . 
" one suit of gray clothes 
(ingeniously unbecom- 
ing) .... 
"musical entertainments 
(drum and fife six 
months) . 
" one dinner after return, 
" chance of pension 
"privilege of drawing 
long bow during rest of 
natural life 



30 



25 



15 



E. E. 



100 



100 



It would appear that Mr. Sawin found the actual 
feast curiously the reverse of the bill of fare adver- 
tised in Faneuil Hall and other places. His primary- 
object seems to have been the making of his fortune. 
Qucerenda pecunia primum, virtus post nummos. He 
hoisted sail for Eldorado, and shipwrecked on Point 
Tribulation. Quid non mortalia pectora cogis, auri 
sacra fames ? The speculation has sometimes crossed 
my mind, in that dreary interval of drought which 
intervenes between quarterly stipendiary showers, 
that Providence, by the creation of a money-tree, 
might have simplified wonderfully the sometimes 
perplexing problem of human life. We read of 
bread-trees, the butter for which lies ready-churned 
in Irish bogs. Milk-trees we are assured of in South 



156 THE B I GLOW PAPERS. 

America, and stout Sir Jolm Hawkins testifies to 
water-trees in the Canaries. Boot-trees bear abun- 
dantly in Lynn and elsewhere ; and I have seen, in 
the entries of the wealthy, hat-trees with a fair show 
of fruit. A family-tree I once cultivated myself, and 
found therefrom but a scanty yield, and that quite 
tasteless and innutritions. Of trees bearing men we 
are not without example ; as those in the park of 
Louis the Eleventh of France. Who has forgotten, 
moreover, that olive-tree, growing in the Athenian's 
back-garden, with its strange uxorious crop, for the 
general propagation of which, as of a new and pre- 
cious variety, the philosopher Diogenes, hitherto un- 
interested in arboriculture, was so zealous ? In the 
sylva of our own Southern States, the females of my 
family have called my attention to the china-tree. 
Not to multiply examples, I will barely add to my 
list the birch-tree, in the smaller branches of which 
has been implanted so miraculous a virtue for com- 
municating the Latin and Greek languages, and which 
may well, therefore, be classed among the trees pro- 
ducing necessaries of life, — venerdbile donumfatalis 
virgcE. That money-trees existed in the golden age 
there want not prevalent reasons for our believing. 
For does not the old proverb, when it asserts that 
money does not grow on every bush, imply a fortiori 
that there were certain bushes which did produce it ? 
Again, there is another ancient saw to the eifect that 
money is the root of all evil. From which two adages 
it may be safe to infer that the aforesaid species of 
tree first degenerated into a shrub, then absconded 
underground, and finally, in our iron age, vanished 
altogether. In favorable exposures it may be con- 



THE B I GLOW PAPERS. 157 

jectured that a specimen or two survived to a great 
age, as in the garden of the Hesperides ; and, indeed, 
what else could that tree in the Sixth iEneid have 
been, with a branch whereof the Trojan hero pro- 
cured admission to a territory, for the entering of 
which money is a surer passport than to a cer- 
tain other more profitable (too) foreign kingdom? 
Whether these speculations of mine have any force 
in them, or whether they will not rather, by most 
readers, be deemed impertinent to the matter in hand, 
is a question which I leave to the determination of 
an indulgent posterity. That there were, in more 
primitive and happier times, shops where money was 
sold, — and that, too, on credit and at a bargain, — I 
take to be matter of demonstration. For what but a 
dealer in this article was that ^olus who supplied 
Ulysses with motive power for his fleet in bags ? 
What that Ericus, king of Sweden, who is said to 
have kept the winds in his cap ? What, in more 
recent times, those Lapland Nomas who traded in 
favorable breezes ? All which will appear the more 
clearly when we consider, that, even to this day, rais- 
ing the wind is proverbial for raising money, and that 
brokers and banks were invented by the Venetians at 
a later period. 

And now for the improvement of this digression. 
I find a parallel to Mr. Sawin's fortune in an ad- 
venture of my own. For, shortly after I had first 
broached to myself the before-stated natural-histori- 
cal and archaeological theories, as I was passing, hoec 
negotia penitus mecum revolvens, through one of the 
obscure suburbs of our New England metropolis, my 
eye was attracted by these words upon a sign-board. 



158 THE BIGLOW PAPERS. 

— Cheap Cash-Store. Here was at once the con- 
firmation of my speculations, and the substance of my 
hopes. Here lingered the fragment of a happier 
past, or stretched out the first tremulous organic fila- 
ment of a more fortunate future. Thus glowed the 
distant Mexico to the eyes of Sawin, as he looked 
through the dirty pane of the recruiting-office win- 
dow, or speculated from the summit of that mirage 
Pisgah which the imps of the bottle are so cunning in 
raising up. Already had my Alnaschar-fancy (even 
during that first half believing glance) expended in 
various useful directions the funds to be obtained by 
pledging the manuscript of a proposed volume of dis- 
courses. Already did a clock ornament the tower of 
the Jaalam meeting-house, a gift appropriately, but 
modestly, commemorated in the parish and town rec- 
ords, both, for now many years, kept by myself. 
Already had my son Seneca completed his course at 
the University. Whether, for the moment, we may 
not be considered as actually lording it over those 
Baratarias with the viceroyalty of which Hope in- 
vests us, and whether we are ever so warmly housed 
as in our Spanish castles, would afford matter of argu- 
ment. Enough that I found that sign-board to be no 
other than a bait to the trap of a decayed grocer. 
!Nevertheless, I bought a pound of dates (getting 
short weight by reason of immense flights of harpy 
flies who pursued and lighted upon their prey even in 
the very scales), which purchase I made, not only 
with an eye to the little ones at home, but also as a 
figurative reproof of that too frequent habit of my 
mind, which, forgetting the due order of chronology, 
will often persuade me that the happy sceptre of 



THE B I GLOW PAPERS. 159 

Saturn is stretched over this Astraea-forsaken nine- 
teenth century. 

Having glanced at the ledger of Glory under 
the title Sawiti, B., let us extend our investigations, 
and discover if that instructive volume does not con- 
tain some charges more personally interesting to our- 
selves. I think we should be more economical of our 
resources, did we thoroughly appreciate the fact, that, 
whenever Brother Jonathan seems to be thrusting his 
hand into his own pocket, he is, in fact, picking ours. 
I confess that the late muck which the country has 
been running has materially changed my views as 
to the best method of raising revenue. If, by means 
of direct taxation, the bills for every extraordinary 
outlay were brought under our immediate eye, so 
that, like thrifty housekeepers, we could see where 
and how fast the money was going, we should be less 
likely to commit extravagances. At present, these 
things are managed in such a hugger-mugger way, 
that we know not what we pay for ; the poor man is 
charged as much as the rich ; and, while we are sav- 
ing and scrimping at the spigot, the government is 
drawing off at the bung. If we could know that a 
part of the money we expend for tea and coffee goes 
to buy powder and balls, and that it is Mexican blood 
which makes the clothes on our backs more costly, it 
would set some of us athinking. During the present 
fall, I have often pictured to myself a government 
official entering my study and handing me the follow- 
ing bill : — 



160 THE BIGLOW PAPERS. 

Washington, Sept. 30, 1848. 
Rev. Homer Wilbur to Mltcle .Samttei, Dr. 
To his share of work done in Mexico on partnership ac- 
count, sundry jobs, as below. 
" killing, maiming, and wounding about 5,000 Mexi- 
cans $2.00 

" slaughtering one woman carrying water to wounded .10 
" extra work on two different Sabbaths (one bom- 
bardment and one assault) whereby the Mexi- 
cans were prevented from defiling themselves 
with the idolatries of high mass . . .3.50 

" throwing an especially fortunate and Protestant 
bombshell into the Cathedral at Vera Cruz, 
whereby several female Papists were slain at 

the altar 50 

" his proportion of cash paid for conquered territory 1.75 
" do. do. for conquering do. . 1.50 

" manuring do. with new superior compost called 

"American Citizen" 50 

" extending the area of freedom and Protestantism . .01 
" glory 01 



$9.87 

Immediate payment is requested. 

N". B. Thankful for former favors, U. S. requests a con- 
tinuance of patronage. Orders executed with neatness and 
despatch. Terms as low as those of any other contractor for 
the same kind and style of work. 

I can fancy the official answering my look of 
horror with " Yes, Sir, it looks like a high charge, 
Sir ; but in these days slaughtering is slaughtering." 
Verily, I would that every one understood that it 
was ; for it goes about obtaining money under the 
false pretence of being glory. For me, I have an 
imagination which plays me uncomfortable tricks. It 
happens to me sometimes to see a slaughterer on his 



THE BIGLOW PAPERS. 161 

■way home from his day's work, and forthwith my 
imagination puts a cocked-hat upon his head and 
epaulettes upon his shoulders, and sets him up as a 
candidate for the Presidency. So, also, on a recent 
public occasion, as the place assigned to the " Rever- 
end Clergy " is just behind that of " Officers of the 
Army and Navy " in processions, it was my fortune 
to be seated at the dimier-table over against one of 
these respectable persons. He was arrayed as (out 
of his own profession) only kings, court-officers, and 
footmen are in Europe, and Indians in America. 
Now what does my over-officious imagination but 
set to work upon him, strip him of his gay livery, 
and present him to me coatless, his trowsers thrust 
into the tops of a pair of boots thick with clotted 
blood, and a basket on his arm out of which lolled 
a gore-smeared axe, thereby destroying my relish 
for the temporal mercies upon the board before 
me? — H. W.] 



No. IX. 
A THIRD LETTER FROM B. SAWIN, Esq. 

[Upon the following letter slender comment will 
be needful. In what river Selemnus has Mr. 8awin 
bathed, that he has become so swiftly oblivious of 
his former loves ? From an ardent and (as befits a 
soldier) confident wooer of that coy bride, the popu- 
lar favor, we see him subside of a sudden into the 
(I trust not jilted) Cincinnatus, returning to his 
plough with a goodly-sized branch of willow in his 
hand ; figuratively returning, however, to a figura- 
tive plough, and from no profound affection for that 
honored implement of husbandry (for which, indeed, 
Mr. Sawin never displayed any decided predilection), 
but in order to be gracefully summoned therefrom 
to more congenial labors. It would seem that the 
character of the ancient Dictator had become part of 
the recognized stock of our modern political comedy, 
though, as our term of office extends to a quadrennial 
length, the parallel is not so minutely exact aS could 
be desired. It is sufficiently so, however, for pur- 
poses of scenic representation. An humble cottage 
(if built of logs, the better) forms the Arcadian back- 
ground of the stage. This rustic paradise is labelled 
Ashland, Jaalam, North Bend, Marshfield, Kinder- 
hook, or Baton Rouge, as occasion demands. Before 
the door stands a something with one handle (the 



THE BIGLOW PAPERS. 163 

other painted in proper perspective), which repre- 
sents, in happy ideal va^ieness, the plough. To this 
the defeated candidate rushes with delirious joy, wel- 
comed as a father by appropriate groups of happy 
laborers, or from it the successful one is torn with 
difficulty, sustained alone by a noble sense of public 
duty. Only I have observed, that, if the scene be 
laid at Baton Rouge or Ashland, the laborers are kept 
carefully in the background, and are heard to shout 
from behind the scenes in a singular tone resembling 
ululation, and accompanied by a sound not unlike 
'V'igorous clapping. This, however, may be artisti- 
cally in keeping with the habits of the rustic popula- 
tion of those localities. The precise connection be- 
tween agricultural pursuits and statesmanship I have 
not been able, after diligent inquiry, to discover. But, 
that my investigations may not be barren of all fruit, 
I will mention one curious statistical fact, which I 
consider thoroughly established, namely, that no real 
farmer ever attains practically beyond a seat in Gen- 
eral Court, however theoretically qualified for more 
exalted station. 

It is probable that some other prospect has been 
opened to Mr. Sawin, and that he has not made this 
great sacrifice without some definite understanding in 
regard to a seat in the cabinet or a foreign mission. 
It may be supposed that we of Jalaam were not un- 
touched by a feeling of villatic pride in beholding our 
townsman occupying so large a space in the public 
eye. And to me, deeply revolving the qualifications 
necessary to a candidate in these frugal times, those 
of Mr. S. seemed peculiarly adapted to a successful 
campaign. The loss of a leg, an arm, an eye, and 



164 THE BIGLOW PAPERS. 

four fingers reduced him so nearly to the condition 
of a vox et prceterea nihil, that I could think of noth- 
ing but the loss of his head by which his chance could 
have been bettered. But since he has chosen to balk 
our suffrages, we must content ourselves with what 
we can get, remembering lactucas non esse dandas, 
dum cardui sufficiant. — H. W.] 

I SPOSE you recollect that I explained my gennle 

views 
In the last billet that I writ, 'way down frum 

Veery Cruze, 
Jest arter I 'd a kind o' ben spontanously sot up 
To run unanimously f er the Presidential cup ; 
O' course it wor n't no wish o' mine, 't wuz f erfle- 

ly distressin'. 
But poppiler enthusiasm gut so almighty pressin' 
Thet, though like sixty all along I fumed an' 

fussed an' sorrered. 
There did n't seem no ways to stop their bringin' 

on me f orrerd : 
Fact is, they udged the matter so, I could n't help 

admittin' 
The Father o' his Country's shoes no feet but 

mine 'ould fit in, 
Besides the savin' o' the soles fer ages to succeed, 
Seein' thet with one wannut foot, a pair 'd be 

more 'n I need ; 
An', tell ye wut, them shoes '11 want a thund'rin* 

sight o' patchin', 
Ef this ere fashion is to last we 've gut into o' 

hatchin' 



THE BIGLOW PAPERS. 165 

A pair o' second Washintons fer every new elec- 
tion, — 

Though, fur ez number one's consarned, I don't 
make no objection. 

I wuz agoin' on to say thet wen at fust I saw 
The masses would stick to 't I wuz the Country's 

father-'n-law, 
(They would ha' hed it Father, but I told 'em 

't would n't du, 
Coz thet wuz sutthin' of a sort they could n't spht 

in tu. 
An' Washinton hed hed the thing laid fairly to 

his door. 
Nor dars n't say 't worn't his'n, much ez sixty 

year afore,) 
But 't aint no matter ez to thet ; wen I wuz nom- 

ernated, 
'T worn't natur but wut I should feel consid'able 

elated. 
An' wile the hooraw o' the thing wuz kind o' noo 

an' fresh, 
I thought our ticket would ha' caird the country 

with a resh. 

Sence I 've come hum, though, an' looked round, 

I think I seem to find 
Strong argiments ez thick ez fleas to make me 

change my mind ; 
It 's clear to any one whose brain ain't fur gone 

in a phthisis. 



166 THE BIG LOW PAPERS. 

Thet hail Columby's happy land is goin' thru a 

crisis, 
An' 't would n't noways du to hev the people's 

mind distracted 
By bein' all to once by sev'ral pop'lar names 

attackted ; 
'T would save holl haycartloads o' fuss an' three 

four months o' jaw, 
Ef some illustrous paytriot should back out an' 

withdraw ; 
So, ez I aint a crooked stick, jest like — like ole 

(I swow, 
I dunno ez I know his name) — I '11 go back to 

my plough. 
Now, 't aint no more 'n is proper 'n' right in sech 

a sitooation 
To hint the course you think '11 be the savin' o' 

the nation ; 
To funk right out o' p'lit'cal strife ain't thought 

to be the thing, 
Without you deacon off the toon you want your 

folks should sing ; 
So I edvise the noomrous friends thet 's in one 

boat with me 
To jest up killock, jam right down their helium 

hard a lee, 
Haul the sheets taut, an', laying out upon the 

Suthun tack, 
Make f er the safest port they can, wich, I think, 

is Ole Zack. 



THE BIGLOW PAPERS. 167 

Next thing you 11 want to know, I spose, wut 
argimimts I seem 

To see thet makes me think this ere '11 be the 
strongest team ; 

Fust place, I 've ben consid'ble round in bar- 
rooms an' saloons 

Agethrin' public sentiment, 'mongst Demmercrats 
and Coons, 

An' 't aint ve'y offen thet I meet a chap but wut 
goes in 

Fer Rough an' Ready, fair an' square, hufs, tal- 
ler, horns, an' skin ; 

I don't deny but wut, fer one, ez fur ez I could 
see, 

I did n't like at fust the Pheladelphy nomer- 
nee; 

I could ha pinted to a man thet wuz, I guess, a 
peg 

Higher than him, — a soger, tu, an' with a wood- 
en leg ; 

But every day with more an' more o' Taylor 
zeal I 'm burnin', 

Seein' wich way the tide thet sets to office is 
aturnin', 

Wy, into Bellers's we notched the votes down on 
three sticks, — 

*T wuz Birdofredum one, Cass aught, an' Taylor 
twenty-six. 

An', bein' the on'y canderdate thet wuz upon the 
ground, 



168 THE B I GLOW PAPERS. 

They said 't wuz no more 'n right thet I should 

pay the drinks all round ; 
Ef I 'd expected sech a trick, I would n't ha' cut 

my foot 
By goin' an' votin' fer myself like a consumed 

coot. 
It did n't make no diff 'rence, though ; I wish I 

may be cust, 
Ef Bellers wuz n't slim enough to say he would 

n't trust ! 

Another pint thet influences the minds o' sober 

j edges 
Is thet the Gin'ral hez n't gut tied hand an' foot 

with pledges ; 
He hez n't told ye wut he is, an' so there aint no 

knowin' 
But wut he may turn out to be the best there is 

agoin' ; 
This, at the o'ny spot thet pinched, the shoe di- 
rectly eases, 
Coz every one is free to 'xpect percisely wut he 

pleases : 
I want free-trade ; you don't ; the Gin'ral is n't 

bound to neither ; — 
I vote my way ; you, yourn ; an' both air sooted 

to a T there. 
Ole Rough an' Ready, tu, 's a Wig, but without 

bein' ultry 
(He 's like a holsome hayinday, thet 's warm, 

but is n't sultry) ; 



THE BIGLOW PAPERS. 169 

He 's jest wut I should call myself, a kin o' 

scratch, ez 't ware, 
Thet aint exacly all a wig nor wholly your own 

hair; 
I 've ben a Wig three weeks myself, jest o' this 

mod'rate soi*t, 
An' don't find them an' Demmercrats so differ- 
ent ez I thought ; 
They both act pooty much alike, an' push an' 

scrouge an' cus ; 
They 're lilie two pickpockets in league fer Un- 
cle Samwell's pus ; 
Each takes a side, an' then they squeeze the old 

man in between 'em, 
Turn all his pockets wi'ong side out an' quick ez 

lightnin' clean 'em ; 
To nary one on 'em I 'd trust a secon'- handed 

rail 
No furder off 'an I could sling a bullock by the 

tail. 
Webster sot matters right in thet air Mashfiel' 

speech o' his'n ; — 
" Taylor," sez he, " aint nary ways the one thet 

I 'd a chizzen, 
Nor he aint fittin' fer the place, an' like ez not 

he aint 
No more 'n a tough ole bullethead, an' no gret of 

a saint ; 
But then," sez he, " obsarve my pint, he 's jest ez 

good to vote fer 



170 THE BIGLOW PAPERS, 

Ez though the greasin' on him worn't a thing to 

hire Choate f er ; 
Aint it ez easy done to drop a hallot in a 

box 
Fer one ez 't is f er t' other, fer the bulldog ez the 

fox ? " 
It takes a mind like Dannel's, fact, ez big ez all 

ou' doors 
To find out thet it looks like rain arter it fairly 

pours ; 
I 'gree with him, it aint so dreffle troublesome to 

vote 
Fer Taylor arter all, — it 's jest to go an' change 

your coat ; 
Wen he 's once greased, you '11 swaller him an' 

never know on 't, scurce, 
Unless he scratches, goin' down, with them air 

Gin'ral's spurs. 
I Ve ben a votin' Demmercrat, ez reg'lar ez a 

clock. 
But don't find goin' Taylor gives my narves no 

gret 'f a shock ; 
Truth is, the cutest leadin' Wigs, ever sence fust 

they found 
Wich side the bread gut buttered on, hev kep' 

a edgin' round ; 
They kin' o' slipt the planks frum out th' ole 

platform one by one. 
An' made it gradooally noo, 'fore folks know'd 

wut wuz done, 



THE BIGLOW PAPERS. 171 

Till, fur 'z I know, there aint an inch thet I could 
lay my han' on. 

But I, or any Demmercrat, feels comf'table to 
Stan' on, 

An' ole Wig doctrines act'lly look, their occ 'pants 
bein gone, 

Lonesome ez staddles on a mash without no hay- 
ricks on. 

I spose it 's time now I should give my thoughts 

upon the plan, 
Thet chipped the shell at Buffalo, o' settin' up 

ole Van. 
I used to vote fer Martiil, but, I swan, I 'm clean 

disgusted, — 
He aint the man thet I can say is fittin' to be 

trusted ; 
He aint half antislav'ry 'nough, nor I aint sure, 

ez some be, 
He 'd go in fer abolishin' the Deestrick o' Co- 

lumby ; 
An', now I come to recollect, it kin' o' makes me 

sick 'z 
A horse, to think o' wut he wuz in eighteen 

thirty-six. 
An' then, another thing ; — I guess, though 

mebby I am wrong. 
This Buff'lo plaster aint agoin' to dror almighty 

strong ; 
Some folks, I know, hev gut th' idee thet No- 

'thun dough '11 rise. 



172 THE BWLOW PAPERS. 

Though, 'fore I see it riz an' baked, I would n't 

trust my eyes ; 
'T will take more emptins, a long chalk, than 

this noo party 's gut, 
To give sech heavy cakes ez them a start, I tell 

ye wut. 
But even ef they caird the day, there would n't 

be no endurin' 
To stand upon a platform with sech critters ez 

Van Buren ; — 
An' his son John, tu, I can't think how thet air 

chap should dare 
To speak ez he doos ; wy, they say he used to 

cuss an' swear ! 
I spose he never read the hymn thet tells how 

down the stairs 
A feller with long legs wuz throwed thet would 

n't say his prayers. 

This brings me to another pint : the leaders o' 
the party 

Aint jest sech men ez I can act along with free 
an' hearty ; 

They aint not quite respectable, an' wen a fel- 
ler's morrils 

Don't toe the straightest kin' o' mark, wy, him 
an' me jest quarrils. 

I went to a free soil meetin' once, an' wut d' ye 
think I see ? 

A feller wuz aspoutin' there thet act'lly come to 
me, 



THE BIGLOW PAPERS. 173 

About two year ago last spring, ez nigh ez I can 

jedge 
An' axed me ef I did n't want to sign the Tem- 

prunce pledge ! 
He 's one o' them thet goes about an' sez you 

hed n't ough' to 
Drink nothin', mornin', noon, or night, stronger 

'an Tamiton water. 
There 's one rule I 've ben guided by, in settlin' 

how to vote, oilers, — 
I take the side thet is n't took by them consarned 

teetotallers. 

Ez fer the niggers, I 've ben South, an' thet hez 

changed my mind ; 
A lazier, more ungrateful set you could n't no- 

wers find. 
You know I mentioned in my last thet I should 

buy a nigger, 
Ef I could make a purchase at a pooty mod'rate 

figger ; 
So, ez there 's nothin' in the world I 'm fonder 

of 'an gunnin', 
I closed a bargin finally to take a feller runnin'. 
I shou'dered queen's-arm an' stumped out, an' 

wen I come t' th' swamp, 
'T worn't very long afore I gut upon the nest o' 

Pomp ; 
I come acrost a kin' o' hut, an', playin' round 

the door, 



174 THE BIGLOW PAPERS. 

Some little wooUy-headed cubs, ez many 'z six or 

more 
At fust I thought o' firin', but think twice is saf- 
est oilers : 
There aint, thinks I, not one on em' but 's wuth 

his twenty dollars, 
Or would be, ef I hed 'em back into a Christian 

land, — 
How temptin' all on 'em would look upon an 

auction-stand ! 
(Not but wut I hate Slavery in th' abstract, stem 

to starn, — 
I leave it ware our fathers did, a privit State 

consarn.) 
Soon 'z they see me, they yelled an' run, but 

Pomp wuz out ahoein' 
A leetle patch o' corn he hed, or else there aint 

no knowin' 
He would n't ha' took a pop at me ; but I hed 

gut the start, 
An' wen he looked, I vow he groaned ez though 

he 'd broke his heart ; 
He done it like a wite man, tu, ez nat'ral ez a 

pictur, 
The imp'dunt, pis'nous hypocrite ! wus 'an a boy 

constrictur. 
" You can't gum me, I tell ye now, an' so you 

need n't try, 
I 'xpect my eye-teeth every mail, so jest shet 

up," sez I. 



THE BIG LOW PAPERS. 175 

" Don't go to actin' ugly now, or else 1 11 jest let 

strip, 
You 'd best draw kindly, seein' 'z how I 've gut 

ye on the hip ; 
Besides, you darned ole fool, it aint no gret of a 

disaster 
To be benev'lently druv back to a contented mas- 
ter. 
Ware you hed Christian priv'ledges you don't 

seem quite aware of, 
Oi* you 'd ha' never run away from bein' well 

took care of ; 
Ez fer kin' treatment, wy, he wuz so fond on ye, 

he said 
He 'd give a fifty spot right out, to git ye, 'live 

or dead ; 
Wite folks aint sot by half ez much ; 'member I 

run away, 
Wen I wuz bound to Cap'n Jakes, to Matty- 

squmscot bay ; 
Don' know him, likely ? Spose not : wal, the 

mean ole codger went 
An' offered — wut reward, think ? Wal, it 

worn't no less 'n a cent." 

Wal, I jest gut 'em into line, an druv 'em on 

afore me. 
The pis'nous brutes, I 'd no idee o' the ill-will 

they bore me ; 
We walked till som'ers about noon, an' then it 

grew so hot 



176 THE BIGLOW PAPERS. 

I thought it best to camp awile, so I chose out a 

spot 
Jest under a magnoly tree, an' there right down 

I sot; 
Then I unstrapped my wooden leg, coz it begun 

to chafe, 
An' laid it down jest by my side, supposin' all 

wuz safe ; 
I made my darkies all set down around me in a 

ring, 
An' sot an' kin' o' cij)hered up how much the lot 

would bring ; 
But, wile I drinked the peaceful cup of a pure 

heart an' mind, 
(Mixed with some wiskey, now an' then,) Pomp 

he snaked up behind, 
An', creepin grad'lly close tu, ez quiet ez a 

mink. 
Jest grabbed my leg, and then pulled foot, 

quicker 'an you could wink, 
An', come to look, they each on 'em hed gut 

behin' a tree, 
An' Pomp poked out the leg a piece, jest so ez I 

could see, 
An' yelled to me to throw away my pistils an' 

my gun, 
Or else thet they 'd cair off the leg an' fairly cut 

the run. 
I vow I did n't b'lieve there wuz a decent alli- 

gatur 



THE BIG LOW PAPERS. 177 

Thet hed a heart so destitoot o' common human 

natur ; 
However, ez there wor n't no help, I finally give 

in 
An' heft my arms away to git my leg safe back 

agin. 
Pomp gethered all the weapins uj), an' then he 

come an' grinned, 
He showed his ivory some, I guess, an' sez, " You 

're fairly pinned ; 
Jest buckle on your leg agin, an' git right up an' 

come, 
'T wun't du fer fammerly men like me to be so 

long from hum." 
At fust I put my foot right down an' swore I 

would n't budge. 
" Jest ez you choose," sez he, quite cool, " either 

be shot or trudge." 
So this black-hearted monster took an' act'Uy 

druv me back 
Along the very feetmarks o' my happy mornin* 

track. 
An' kep' me pris'ner 'bout six months, an' worked 

me, tu, hke sin. 
Till I hed gut his corn an' his Carliny taters 

in ; 
He made me larn him readin', tu, (although the 

crittur saw 
How much it hut my morril sense to act agin the 

law,) 



178 THE BIGLOW PAPERS. 

So 'st he could read a Bible he 'd gut ; an' axed 

ef I could pint 
The North Star out ; but there I put his nose 

some out o' jint, 
Fer I weeled roun' about sou'west, an', lookin' up 

a bit, 
Picked out a middlin' shiny one an' tole him thet 

wuz it. 
Fin'lly, he took me to the door, an', givin' me a 

kick, 
Sez, " Ef you know wut 's best fer ye, be off, 

now, double-quick ; 
The winter-time 's a comin' on, an', though I gut 

ye cheap. 
You 're so darned lazy, I don't think you 're 

hardly wuth your keep ; 
Besides, the childrin 's growin' up, an' you aint 

jest the model 
I 'd like to hev 'em immertate, an' so you 'd bet- 
ter toddle ! " 

Now is there any thin' on airth '11 ever prove to 

me 
Thet renegader slaves like him air fit fer bein' 

free? 
D' you think they 'U suck me in to jine the 

Buff'lo chaps, an' them 
Rank infidels thet go agin the Scriptur'l cus o' 

Shem? 
Not by a jugfuU ! sooner 'n thet, I 'd go tliru 

fire an' water ; 



THE BIG LOW PAPERS. 179 

Wen I hev once made up my mind, a meet'nhus 

aint sotter ; 
No, not though all the crows thet flies to pick my 

bones wuz cawin', — 
I guess we 're in a Christian land, — 
Yourn, 

BIRDOFREDUM SAWIN. 

[Here, patient reader, we take leave of each other, 
I trust with some mutual satisfaction. I say patient^ 
for I love not that kind wliich skims dippingly over 
the surface of the page, as swallows over a pool 
before rain. By such no pearls shall be gathered. 
But if no pearls there be (as, indeed, the world is not 
without example of books wherefrom the longest- 
winded diver shall bring up no more than his proper 
handful of mud), yet let us hope that an oyster or 
two may reward adequate perseverance. If neither 
pearls nor oysters, yet is patience itself a gem worth 
diving deeply for. 

It may seem to some that too much space has been 
usurped by my own private lucubrations, and some 
may be fain to bring against me that old jest of him 
who preached all his hearers out of the meeting- 
house save only the sexton, who, remaining for yet a 
little space, from a sense of official duty, at last gave 
out also, and, presenting the keys, humbly requested 
our preacher to lock the doors, when he should have 
wholly relieved himself of his testimony. I confess 
to a satisfaction in the self act of preaching, nor do I 
esteem a discourse to be wholly thrown away even 
upon a sleeping or unintelligent auditory. I cannot 
easily believe that the Gospel of Saint John, which 



180 THE BIGLOW PAPERS. 

Jacques Cartier ordered to be read in the Latin 
tongue to the Canadian savages, upon his first meet- 
ing with them, fell altogether upon stony ground. 
For the earnestness of the preacher is a sermon ap- 
preciable by dullest intellects and most alien ears. 
In this wise did Episcopius convert many to his opin- 
ions, who yet understood not the language in which 
he discoursed. The chief thing is, that the mes- 
senger believe that he has an authentic message to 
deliver. For counterfeit messengers that mode of 
treatment which Father John de Piano Carpini re- 
lates to have prevailed among the Tartars would 
seems effectual, and, perhaps, deserved enough. For 
my own part, I may lay claim to so much of the 
spirit of martyrdom as would have led me to go into 
banishment with those clergymen whom Alphonso 
the Sixth of Portugal drave out of his kingdom for 
refusing to shorten their pulpit eloquence. It is pos- 
sible, that, having been invited into my brother Big- 
low's desk, I may have been too little scrupulous in 
using it for the venting of my own peculiar doctrines 
to a congregation drawn together in the expectation 
and with the desire of hearing him. 

I am not wholly unconscious of a peculiarity of men- 
tal organization which impels me, like the railroad- 
engine with its train of cars, to run backward for a 
short distance in order to obtain a fairer start. I may 
compare myself to one fishing from the rocks when 
the sea runs high, who, misinterpreting the suction of 
the under-tow for the biting of some larger fish, jerks 
suddenly, and finds that he has caught bottom, hauling 
in upon the end of his line a trail of various algce, 
among which, nevertheless, the naturalist may haply 
find somewhat to repay the disappointment of the 



THE BIG LOW PAPERS. l8l 

angler. Yet have I conscientiously endeavored to 
adapt myself to the impatient temper of the age, 
daily degenerating more and more from the high 
standard of our pristine New England. To the cat- 
alogue of lost arts I would mournfully add also that 
of listening to two-hour sermons. Surely we have 
been abridged into a race of pigmies. For, truly, in 
those of the old discourses yet subsisting to us in 
print, the endless spinal column of divisions and sub- 
divisions can be likened to nothing so exactly as to 
the vertebrae of the saurians, whence the theorist 
may conjecture a race of Anakim proportionate to 
the withstanding of these other monsters. I say An- 
akim rather than Nephelim, because there seem rea- 
sons for supposing that the race of those whose heads 
(though no giants) are constantly enveloped in clouds 
(which that name imports) will never become extinct. 
The attempt to vanquish the mnumerable heads of 
one of those aforementioned discourses may supply 
us with a plausible interpretation of the second labor 
of Hercules, and his successful experiment with fire 
affords us a useful precedent. 

But while I lament the degeneracy of the age in 
this regard, I cannot refuse to succumb to its influ- 
ence. Looking out through my study- window, I see 
Mr. Biglow at a distance busy in gathering his Bald- 
wins, of which, to judge by the number of barrels 
lying about under the trees, his crop is more abun- 
dant than my own, — by which sight I am admonished 
to turn to those orchards of the mind wherein my 
labors may be more prospered, and apply myself dili- 
gently to the preparation of my next Sabbath's dis- 
course. — H. W.] 



GLOSSARY. 



A. 



Act'lly, actually. 
Air, are. 
Airth, earth. 
Airy, area. 
Aree, area. 
Arter, after. 
Ax, ask. 



Beller, bellow. 
Bellowses, lungs. 
Ben, been. 
Bile, boil. 
Bimeby, by and by. 
Blurt out, to speak bluntly. 
Bust, burst. 

Buster, a roistering blade ; used 
also as a general superlative. 



Caird, carried. 

Cairn, carrying. 

Caleb, a turncoat. 

Cal'late, calculate. 

Cass, a person with two lives. 

Close, clothes. 

Cockerel, a young cock. 

Cocktail, a kind of drink ; also, 
an ornament peculiar to sol- 
diers. 

Convention, a place where peo- 
ple are imposed on; a jug- 
gler'' s show. 

Coons, a cant term for a now de- 
funct party; derived, perhaps, 
from the fact of their being I 
commonly up a tree. 

Cornwallis, a sort of muster in I 



masquerade ; supposed to have 
had its origin soon after the 
Revolution, and to commemo- 
rate the surrender of Lord 
Cornwallis. It took the place 
of the old Guy Fawkes proces- 
sion. 

Crooked stick, a perverse, fro- 
ward person. 

Cunnle, a colonel. 

Cus, a curse ; also, a pitiful fel- 
low. 



Darsn't, used indiscriminately, 
either in singular or pluial 
number, for dare not, dares 
not, and dared not. 

Deacon off, to give the cue to ; 
derived from a custom, once 
universal, now extinct, in our 
New England Congregational 
churches. An important part 
of the office of deacon was to 
read aloud the hymns given out 
by the minister, one line at a 
time, the congregation sing- 
ing each line as soon as read. 

Demmercrat, leadin', one in fa- 
vor of extending slavery; a 
free-trade lecturer maintained 
in the custom-house. 

Desput, desperate. 

Doos, does. 

Doughface, a contented lickspit- 
tle; a common variety of 
Northern politician. 

Dror, draw. 

Du, do. 

Dvmno, dno, do not or does not 
know. 

Dut, Dirt. 



184 



GLOSSARY. 



E. 



Eend, end. 
Ef , if. 

Emptins, yeast. 
Env'y, envoy. 

Everlasting, an intensive, with- 
out reference to duration. 
Ev'y, every. 



Fer, for. 

Ferfle, tevivl, fearful ; also an in- 
tensive. 

¥ixi\ find. 

Fish-skin, used in New England 
to clarify coffee. 

Fix, a difficulty, a nonplus. 

Foller, foUy, to follow. 

Forrerd, forward. 

Frum, from. 

Fur, far. 

Furder, farther. 

Furrei; furrow. Metaphorically, 
to draw a straight furrow is to 
hve uprightly or decorously. 

Fust, first. 



G. 



Gin, gave. 
Git, get. 
Gret, great. 

Grit, spirit, energy, pluck. 
Grout, to sulk. 
Grouty, crabbed, surly. 
Gum, to impose on. 
Giunp, a foolish fellow, a dul- 
lard. 
Gut, got. 



Hed, had. 
Heern, heard. 
Helium, helm. 
Hendy, handy. 
Het, heated. 
Hev, have. 
Hez, has. 
Holl, whole. 
Holt, hold. 
Huf, hoof. 



Hull, whole. 
Hum, home. 

Humbug, General Taylor'' s anti- 
slavery. 
Hut, hurt. 



Idno, I do not know. 

In'my, enemy. 

Insines, ensigns ; used to desig- 
nate both the officer who car- 
ries the standard, and the 
standard itself. 

Inter, intu, into. 



Jedge, judge. 
Jest, just. 
Jine, join. 
Jint, joint. 

Junk, a fragment of any solid 
substance. 



Keer, care. 
Kep, kept. 

Killock, a small anchor. 
Kin', kin' o', kinder, kind, kind 
of 



Lawth, loath. 

Let day-light into, to shoot. 

Let on, to hint, to confess, to own. 

Lick, to beat, to overcome. 

Lights, the bowels. 

Lily-pads, leaves of the water-lily. 

Long -sweetening, molasses. 



Mash, marsh. 

Mean, stingy, ill-natured. 

MLn' 



twelve 



N. 

Nimepunce, ninepence, 

and a half cents. 
Nowers, nowhere. 



GLOSSARY 



185 



Off en, often. 

Ole, old. 

Oilers, olluz, always. 

On, of; used before it or them., 
or at the end of a sentence, as, 
onH, on 'em, nut ez ever Iheerd 
on. 

On'y, only. 

Ossifer, officer (seldom heard). 



Peaked, pointed. 

Peek, to peep. 

Pickerel, the pike, a fish. 

Tint, point. 

Pocket full of rocks, plenty of 

money. 
Pooty, pretty. 
Pop'ler, conceited, popular. 
Pus, purse. 
Put out, troubled, vexed. 



Quarter, a quarter-dollar. 
Queen's arm, a musket. 



R. 

Resh, rush. 

Revelee, the reveille. 

Rile, to trouble. 

Riled, angry ; disturbed, as the 
sediment in any liquid. 

Riz, risen. 

Row, a long row to hoe, a diffi- 
cult task. 

Rugged, robust. 



Sarse, abuse, impertinence. 
Sartin, certain. 
Saxon, sacristan, sexton. 
Scaliest, worst. 
Scringe, cringe. 
Scrouge, to crowd. 
Sech, such. 
Set by, valued. 

Shakes, great, of considerable 
consequence. 



Shappoes, chapeaux, cocked-hats. 

Sheer, share. 

Shet, shut. 

Shut, shirt. 

Skeered, scared. 

Skeeter, mosquito, 

Skooting, running, or moving 
swiftly. 

Slarterin', slaughtering. 

Slim, contemptible. 

Snaked, crawled like a snake; 
but to snake any one out is to 
track him to his hiding-place ; 
to snake a thing out is to snatch 
it out. 

SoflBes, sofas. 

Sogerin', soldiering ; a barbarous 
amusement common among 
men in the savage state. 

Som'ers, somewhere. 

So 'st, so as that. 

Sot, set, obstinate, resolute. 

Spiles, spoils ; objects of political 
ambition. 

Spry, active. 

Staddles, stout stakes driven into 
salt marshes, on which the hay- 
ricks are set, and thus raised 
out of the reach of high tides. 

Streaked, uncomfortable, dis- 
comfited. 

Suckle, circle. 

Sutthin', something. 

Suttin, certain. 



Take on, to sorrow. 

Talents, talons. 

Taters, potatoes. 

Tell, till. 

Tetch, touch. 

Tetch tu, to be able ; used always 
after a negative in this sense. 

Tollable, tolerable. 

Toot, used derisively for playing 
on any wind instrument. 

Thru, through. 

Thundering, a euphemism com- 
mon in New England, for the 
profane English expression dev- 
ilish. Perhaps derived from 
the belief, common formerly, 
that thunder was caused by the 
Prince of the Air, for some of 
whose accomplisiiments con- 
sult Cotton Mather. 



186 



GLOSSARY. 



Tu, to, too; commonly has this 
sound when used emphatically, 
or at the end of a sentence. 
At other times it has a sound 
of < in faugh, as, Ware ye goin'' 
tu ? Goin'' tu Boston. 



U. 



Ugly, ill-tempered, intractable. 
Uncle Sam, United States; the 

largest boaster of liberty and 

owner of slaves. 
Unrizzest, applied to dough or 

bread ; heavy, most unrisen, 

or most incapable of rising. 



V spot, a five-dollar bill. 
Vally, value. 



W. 



to get into trouble, 
Wal, well; spoken with great de- 
liberation, and sometimes with 
the a very much flattened, 
sometimes (but more seldom) 
very much broadened. 



Wannut, walnut (hickory). 

Ware, where. 

Ware, were. 

Whopper, an uncommonly large 
lie; as, that General Taylor 
is in favor of the Wilmot Pro- 
viso. 

Wig, Whig ; a party now dis- 
solved. 

Wunt, will not. 

Wus, worse. 

Wut, what. 

Wuth, worth; as, Antislavery 
perfessions fore Uection aint 
wuth a Bungtown copper. 

Wus, was, sometimes were. 



T. 

Taller, yellow. 
Yeller, yellow. 
Yellars, a disease of peach-trees. 



Zach, Ole, a second Washington, 
an antislavery slaveholder, a 
humane buyer and seller of men 
and women, a Christian hero 
generally. 



INDEX. 



A. B., information wanted con- 
cerning, 130. 

Adam, eldest son of, respected, 
60. 

JEneas goes to hell, 157. 

iEolus, a seller of money, as is 
supposed by some, 157. 

.^schylus, a saying of, 104, note. 

Alligator, a decent one conjec- 
tured to be, in some sort, hu- 
mane, 176. 

Alphonso the Sixth of Portugal, 
tyrannical act of, ISO. 

Ambrose, Saint, excellent (but 
rationalistic) sentiment of, 86. 

•' American Citizen," new com- 
post so called, 160. 

American Eagle, a source of in- 
spiration, 96 — hitherto wrong- 
ly classed, 104 — long bill of, 

Amos, cited, 85. 

Anakim, that they formerly ex- 
isted, shown, 181. 

Angels, providentially speak 
French, 73 — conjectured to 
be skilled in all tongues, ib. 

Anglo-Saxondom, its idea, what, 
70. 

Anglo-Saxon mask, 71. 

Anglo-Saxon race, 66. 

Anglo-Saxon verse, by whom 
carried to perfection, 61. I 

Antonius, a speech of, 91 — by j 
whom best reported, ib. 

Apocalypse, beast in, magnetic j 
to theologians, 137. j 

Apollo, confessed mortal by his 
own oracle, 137. 

Apollyon, his tragedies popular, 
126. 



Appian, an Alexandrian, not 
equal to Shakspeare as an 
orator, 91. 

Ararat, igporance of foreign 
tongues is an, 106. 

Arcadian background, 162. 

Aristophanes, 84. 

Arms, profession of, once es- 
teemed especially that of gen- 
tlemen, 60. 

Arnold, 93. 

Ashland, 162. 

Astor, Jacob, a rich man, 146. 

AstriBa, nineteenth century for- 
saken by, 59. 

Athenians, ancient, an institu- 
tion of, 92. 

Atherton, Senator, envies the 
loon, 114. 

Austin, St., profane wish of, 94, 
note. 

Aye-Aye, the, an African animal, 
America supposed to be settled 
by, 75. 

B. 

Babel, probably the first Con- 
gress, 105 — a gabble-mill, ib. 

Baby, a low-priced one, 154. 

Bago\vind, Hon. Mr., whether to 
be damned, 117. 

Baldwin apples, 181. 

Baratarias, real or imaginary, 
which most pleasant, 158. 

Bamum, a great natural curios- 
ity recommended to, 101. 

Barrels, an inference from see- 
ing, 181. 

Baton Rouge, 162 — strange pe- 
culiarities of laborers at, 163. 

Baxter, R., a saying of, 86. 

Bay, Mattysqumscot, 175. 



188 



INDEX. 



Bay State, gingtilar effect pro- 
duced on military officers by 
leaving it, 71. 

Beast in Apocalypse, a loadstone 
for whom, 137. 

Beelzebub, bis rigadoon, 114. 

Bebmen, bis letters not letters, 
130. 

Bellers, a saloon-keeper, 167 — 
inhumanly refuses credit to a 
presidential candidate, 169. 

Biglow, Ezekiel, his letter to 
Hon. J. T. Buckingham, 52 — 
never beard of any one named 
Mundisbes, 53 — nearly four- 
score years old, ib. — his aunt 
Keziah, a notable saying of, 54. 

Biglow, Hosea, excited by com- 
position, 53 — a poem by, 54, 
120 — his opinion of war, 55 — 
wanted at home by Nancy, 58 

— recommends a forcible en- 
listment of warlike editors, ib. 

— would not wonder, if gener- 
ally agreed with, ib. — versi- 
fies letter of Mr. Sawin, 61 — 
a letter from, 62, 110 — bis 
opinion of Mr. Sawin, 63 — 
does not deny fun at Com- 
wallis, 64, note — his idea of 
militia glory, 67, note — a pun 
of, 68, note — is uncertain in 
regard to people of Boston, ih. 

— had never beard of Mr. John 
P. Robinson, 77 — aliquid suf- 
Jlaminandus, 78 — his poems 
attributed to a Mr. Lowell, 83 

— is unskilled in Latin, 84 — 
his poetry maligned by some, 
85 — his disinterestedness, ib. 

— his deep share in common- 
weal, ib. — his claim to the 
presidency, ib. — his mowing, 
ib. — resents being called 
Whig, 86 — opposed to tariff, 
ib. — obstinate, ib. — infected 
with peculiar notions, ib. — re- 
ports a speech, 91 — emulates 
historians of antiquity, ib. — 
his character sketched from a 
hostile point of view, 104 — a 
request of his complied with, 
118 — appointed at a public 
meeting in Jaalam, 131 — con- 
fesses ignorance, in one minute 
particular, of propriety, ib. — 
his opinion of cocked hats, 132 

— letter to, ib. —called " Dear 



Sir," by a general, ib. — prob- 
ably receives some compliment 
from two hundred and nine, 
131 — picks bis apples, 181 — 
bis crop of Baldwins conjec- 
turally large, ib. 

BilUngs, Dea. Cephas, 64. 

Birch, virtue of, in instilling cer- 
tain of the dead languages, 
156. 

Bird of our country sings hosan- 
na, 66. 

Bhnd, to go it, 153. 

Blitz pulls ribbons from his 
mouth, &Q. 

Bluenose potatoes, smell of, ea- 
gerly desired, 67. 

Bobtail obtains a cardinal's hat, 
76. 

BoUes, Mr. Secondary, presents 
sword to Lieutenant-Colonel, 
65 — a fluent orator, ib. — au- 
thor of prize peace essay, 66 — 
found to be in error, 67. 

Bonaparte, N., a usurper, 137 

Boot-trees, productive, where, 
156. 

Boston, people of, supposed edu- 
cated, 68, note. 

Brahmins, navel-contemplating, 
128. 

Bread-trees, 155. 

Brigadier-Generals in militia, de- 
votion of, 89. 

Brown, Mr., engages in an une- 
qual contest, 117. 

Browne, Sir T. , a pious and wise 
sentiment of, cited and com- 
mended, 61. 

Buckingham, Hon. J. T., editor 
of the Boston Courier, letters 
to, 52, 62, 83, 110 — not afraid, 
63. , 

Buffalo, a plan hatched there, 
171 — plaster, a prophecy in 
regard to, ib. 

Buncombe, in the other world 
supposed, 92. 

Bung, the eternal, thought to be 
loose, 57. 

Bungtown Fencibles, dinner of, 
71. 

Butter in Irish bogs, 155. 



C. 

C, General, commended for 



INDEX, 



189 



parts, 79 — for ubiquity, ib. — 
for consistency, ib. — for fidel- 
ity, ib. — is in favor of war, 
ib. — his curious valuation of 
principle, ib. 

CsBsar, tribute to, 122 — hist'eni, 
vidi, vici, censured for undue 
prolixity, 139. 

Cainites, sect of, supposed still 
extant, ()0. 

Caleb, a monopoly of his denied, 
65 — curious notions of, as to 
meaning of "shelter,"' G9 — 
his definition of Anglo-Saxon, 
70 — charges Mexicans (not 
with bayonets, but) with im- 
proprieties, ib. 

Calhoun, Hon. J. C, his cow- 
bell curfew, light of the nine- 
teenth century to be extin- 
guished at sound of, 103 — 
cannot let go apron-string of 
the Past, 109 — his unsuccess- 
ful tilt at Spirit of the Age, ib. 
— the Sir Kay of modern chiv- 
alry, ib. — his anchor made of 
a crooked pin, 110 — men- 
tioned, 111-115. 

Cambridge Platform, use dis- 
covered for, 75. 

Canary Islands, 156. 

Candidate, presidential, letter 
from, 132 — smells a rat, ib. — 
against a bank, 133 — takes a 
revolving position, ib. — opin- 
ion of pledges, 13-1 — is a peri- 
wig, ib. — fronts south by 
north, 135 — qualifications of, 
lessening, 139 — wooden leg 
(and head) useful to, 152. 

Cape God clergjonen, what, 74 — 
Sabbath-breakers, perhaps, re- 
proved by, ib. 

Carpini, Father John de Piano, 
among the Tartars, 180. 

Cartier, Jacques, commendable 
zeal of, 180. 

Cass, General, 112 — clearness of 
his merit, 113 — limited popu- 
larity at " Bellers's," 1G7. 

Castles, Spanish, comfortable ac- 
commodations in, 158. 

Cato, letters of, so called, sus- 
pended naso adunco, 130. 

C. D., friends of, can hear of 
him, 130. 

Chalk egg, we are proud of in- 
cubation of, 129. 



Chappelow on Job, a copy of, 
lost, 119. 

Clierubusco, news of, its effects 
on English royalty, 103. 

Chesterfield no letter-writer, 
120. 

Chief Magistrate, dancing es- 
teemed sinful by, 74. 

Children naturally speak He- 
brew, 61. 

China-tree, 156. 

Chinese, whether they invented 
gunpowder before the Chris- 
tian era not considered, 75. 

Choate hired, 170. 

Christ shuttled into Apocrypha, 
76 — conjectured to disai> 
prove of slaughter and pillage, 
80 — condemns a certain piece 
of barbarism, 117. 

Christianity, profession of, ple- 
beian, whether, GO. 

Christian soldiers, perhaps incon- 
sistent, whether, 90. 

Cicero, an opinion of, disputed, 
138. 

Cilley, Ensign, author of nefari- 
ous sentiment, 76. 

Cimex lectularius, 68. 

Cinciunatus, a stock character in 
modern comedy, 162. 

CiviUzation, progress of, an alias, 
120 — rides upon a powder- 
cart, 133. 

Clergymen, their ill husbandry, 
118 — their place in proces- 
sions, IGl — some, cruelly ban- 
ished for the soundness of 
their lungs, 180. 

Cocked-hat, advantages of being 
knocked into, 132. 

College of Cardinals, a strange 
one, 76. 

Colman, Dr. Benjamin, anecdote 
of, 90. 

Colored folks, curious national 
diversion of kicking, 69. 

Colquitt, a remark of, 114 — ac- 
quainted with some principles 
of aerostation, ib. 

Columbia, District of, its pecu- 
liar climatic effects, 95 — not 
certain that Martin is for abol- 
ishing it, 171. 

Columbus, a Paul Pry of genius, 
128. 

Columby, 160. 



190 



INDEX. 



Complete Letter-Writer, fatal 
gift of, 136. 

ComposteUa, St. James of, seen, 
72. 

Congress, singular consequence 
of getting into, 95. 

Congressional debates, found in- 
structive, 106. 

Constituents, useful for what, 96. 

Constitution trampled on, 111 — 
to stand upon, what, 133. 

Convention, what, 95, 96. 

Convention, Springfield, 95. 

Coon, old, pleasure in skinning, 
112. 

Coppers, caste in picking up of, 
149. 

Copres, a monk, his excellent 
method of arguing, 107. 

Cornwallis, a, 64 — acknowl- 
edged entertaining, ib., note. 

Cotton Mather, summoned as 
witness, 73. 

Coimtry lawyers , sent providen- 
tially, 81. 

Country, our, its boundaries 
more exactly defined, 82 — 
right or wrong, nonsense 
about exposed, ib. 

Courier, The Boston, an unsafe 
print, 105. 

Court, General, farmers some- 
times attain seats in, 163. 

Covvper, W., his letters com- 
mended, 130. 

Creed, a safe kind of, 153. 

Crusade, first American, 73. 

Cuneiform script recommended, 
139. 

Curiosity distinguishes man from 
brutes, 129. 

D. 

Davis, Mr., of Mississippi, a re- 
mark of his, 112. 

Day and Martin, proverbially 
"on hand," 53. 

Death, rings down curtain, 126. 

Delphi, oracle of, surpassed, 103, 
note — alluded to, 139. 

Destiny,, her account, 102. 

Devil, the, unskilled in certain 
Indian tongues, 73. 

Dey of Tripoli, 108. 

Diaz, Bernal, has a vision, 72 — 
his relationship to the Scarlet 
Woman, ib. 



Didjonus, a somewhat volumi- 
nous grammarian, 137. 

Dighton rock character might be 
usefully employed in some 
emergencies, 139. 

Dimitry Bruisgins, fresh supply 
of, 127. 

Diogenes, his zeal for propagat- 
ing certain variety of olive, 
156, 

Dioscuri, imps of the pit, 73. 

District-Attorney, contemptible 
conduct of one, 108. 

Ditchwater on brain, a too com- 
mon aUing, 107 

Doctor, the, a proverbial saying 
of, 72. 

Doughface, yeast-proof, 124. 

Drayton, a martyr, 108 — north 
star, culpable for aiding, wheth- 
er, 115. 

E. 

Earth, Dame, a peep at her 
housekeeping, 109. 

Eating words, habit of, conven- 
ient in time of famine, 101. 

Eavesdroppers, 128. 

Editor, his position, 118 — com- 
manding pulpit of, 119 — large 
congregation of, ib. — name 
derived from what, 120 — fond- 
ness for mutton, ib. — a pious 
one, his creed, ib. — a show- 
man, 124 — in danger of sud- 
den arrest, without bail, 126. 

Editors, certain ones who crow 
Uke cockerels, 58. 

Egyptian darkness, phial of, use 
for, 139. 

Eldorado, Mr. Sawin sets sail 
for, 155. 

Elizabeth, Queen, mistake of her 
ambassador, 92. 

Empedocles, 128. 

Employment, regular, a good 
thing, 148. 

Epaulets, perhaps no badge of 
saintship, 80. 

Episcopius, his marvellous ora- 
tory, 180. 

Eric, King of Sweden, his cap, 
157. 

Evangelists, irou ones, 75. 

Eyelids, a divine shield against 
autliors, 107. 

Ezekiel, text taken from, 118. 



INDEX. 



191 



Factory-girls, expected rebellion 
of, 114. 

Family-trees, fruit of jejune, 
15G. 

FaneuU Hall, a place where per- 
sons tap themselves for a spe- 
cies of hydrocephalus, 107 — a 
bill of fare mendaciously ad- 
vertised in, 155. 

Father of country, his shoes, 
164. 

Female Papists, cut off in midst 
of idolatry, IGO. 

Fire, we all like to play with it, 
104. 

Fish, emblematic, but disregard- | 
ed, where, 107. 

Flam, president, untrustworthy, 
97. 

Fly-leaves, providential increase 
of, 107. 

Foote, Mr., his taste for field- 
sports, 111. 

Fourier, a squinting toward, 105. 

Fourth of Julys, boiling, 93. 

France, a strange dance begun 
in, 114. 

Fuller, Dr. Thomas, a wise say- 
ing of, 78. 

Fuimel, Old, hurraing in, 65. 



Gawain, Sir, his amusements, 
110. 

Gay, S. H., Esquire, editor of Na- 
tional Antislavery Standard, 
letter to, 128. 

Getting up early, 55, 70. 

Ghosts, some, presumed fidgetty, 
(but see Stilling's Pneumatol- 
ogy,) 130. 

Giants formerly stupid, 110. 

Gift of tongues, distressing case 
of, 106. 

Globe Theatre, cheap season- 
ticket to, 126. 

Glory, a perquisite of officers, 
150 — her accoimt with B. 
Sawin, Esq., 155. 

Goatsnose, the celebrated, inter- 
view with, 139. 

Gray's letters are letters, 130. 

Great horn spoon, sworn by, 
111. 



Greeks, ancient, whether they 

questioned candidates, 138. 
Green Man, sign of, 86. 



H. 

Ham, sandwich, an orthodox 
(but peculiar) one, 116. 

Hamlets, machine for making, 
143. 

Hammon, 103, note, 137. 

Hannegan, Mr., something said 
by, 113. 

Harrison, General, how pre- 
served, 136. 

Hat-trees, in full bearing, 156. 

Hawkins, Sir Jolm, stout, some- 
tliing he saw, 156. 

Henry the Fourth of England, 
a Parliament of, how named, 
92. 

Hercules, his second labor prob- 
ably what, 181. 

Herodotus, story from, 62. 

Hesperides, an inference from, 
157. 

Holden, Mr. Shearjashub, Pre- 
ceptor of Jaalam Academy, 
137 — his knowledge of Greek 
limited, ib. — a heresy of his, 
lb. — leaves a fund to propa- 
gate it, 138. 

HoUis, Ezra, goes to a Comwal- 
lis, 54. 

Hollow, why men providentially 
so constructed, 93. 

Homer, a phrase of, cited, 119. 

Homers, democratic ones, plums 
left for, 98. 

Howell, James, Esq., story told 
by, 92 — letters of, commend- 
ed, 130. 

Human rights out of order on 
the floor of Congress, 111. 

Humbug, ascription of praise to, 
124 — generally believed in, 
ib. 

Husbandry, instance of bad, 78. 



I. 



Icarius, Penelope's father, 83. 

Infants, prattlings of, curious ob- 
servation concerning, 61. 

Information wanted (universally, 
but especially at page), 130. 



192 



INDEX. 



Jaalam Centre, Anglo-Saxons 
unjustly suspected by the 
young ladies there, 71 — " In- 
dependent Blunderbuss," 
strange conduct of editor of, 
118 — public meeting at, 131. 

Jaalam Point, light-house on, 
charge of prospectively offered 
to Mr. H. Biglow, 135 — meet- 
ing-house ornamented with 
imaginary clock, 158. 

Jakes, Captain, 175 — reproved 
for avarice, 175. 

James the Fourth of Scots, ex- 
periment by, 62. 

Jarnagin, Mr., his opinion of the 
completeness of northern edu- 
cation, 113. 

Jerome, Saint, his list of sacred 
writers, 130. 

Job, Book of, 60 — Chappelow 
on, 119. 

Johnson, Mr. , communicates 
some intelligence, 114. 

Jonah, the mevitable destiny of, 
116 — probably studied inter- 
nal economy of the cetacea, 
129. 

Jortin, Dr., cited, 90, 103, note. 

Judea, every tiling not known 
there, 81. 

Juvenal, a saying of, 102, note. 



Kay, Sir, the, of modern chival- 
ry, who, 109. 

Key, brazen one, 108. 

Keziah, Aunt, profoimd observa- 
tion of, 54. 

Kmderhook, 162. 

Kingdom Come, march to, easy, 
144. 

Konigsmark, Count, 60. 



Lamb, Charles, his epistolary 
excellence, 130. 

Latimer, Bishop, episcopizes Sa- 
tan, 60. 

Latin tongue, curious informa- 
tion concerning, 84. 

Launcelot, Sir, a trusser of gi- 



ants formerly, perhaps would 
find less sport therein now, 
110. . 

Letters classed, 130 — their 
shape, 131 — of candidates, 135 
-- of ten fatal, 136. 

Lewis Philip, a scourger of young 
native Americans, 103 — com- 
miserated (though not deserv- 
ing it), ib.,note. 

Liberator, a newspaper, con- 
demned by implication, 87. 

Liberty imwholesome for men of 
certain complexions, 121. 

Lignum vitse, a gift of this valu- 
able wood proposed, 72. 

Longinus recommends swearing, 
63, note (Fuseli did same 
thing). 

Long sweetening recommended, 
145. 

Lost arts, one sorrowfully added 
to Ust of, 181. 

Louis the Eleventh of France, 
some odd trees of his, 156. 

Lowell, Mr. J. R., imaccovmtable 
silence of, 83. 

Luther, Martin, his first appear- 
ance as Europa, 72. 

Lyttelton, Lord, his letters an 
imposition, 130. 



M. 

Macrobii, their diplomacy, 139. 

Mahomet, got nearer Sinai than 
some, 120. 

Mahound, his filthy gobbets, 73. 

Mangum, Mr., speaks to the 
point, 112. 

Manichsean, excellently confut- 
ed, 107. 

Man-trees, grew where, 156. 

Mares'-nests, finders of, benevo- 
lent, 129. 

Marshfield, 162, 169. 

Martin, Mr. Sawin used to vote 
for hun, 171. 

Mason and Dixon's line, slaves 
north of, 112. 

Mass, the, its duty defined, 112. 

Massachusetts on her knees, 58 
— something mentioned in con- 
nection with, worthy the at- 
tention of tailors, 95 — citizen 
of, baked, boiled, and roasted 
(nefandum .'), 150. 



INDEX. 



193 



Masses, the, used as butter by 
some, 98. 

M. C, an invertebrate animal, 
101. 

Mechanics' Fair, reflections sug- 
gested at, 142. 

Mentor, letters of, dreary, 130. 

Mephistopheles at a nonplus, 
IIG. 

Mexican blood, its effect in rais- 
ing price of cloth, 159. 

Mexican polka, 74. 

Mexicans charged with various 
breaches of etiquette, 70 — 
kind feelings beaten into them, 
124. 

Mexico, no glory in overcoming, 
96. 

Military glory spoken disrespect- 
fully of, 68, note — militia 
treated still worse, ib. 

Milk-trees growing still, 155. 

Mills for manufacturing gabble, 
how driven, 105. 

Milton, an unconscious plagiary, 
94, note — a Latin verse of, 
cited, 120. 

Missions, a profitable kind of, 
121. 

Monarch, a pagan, probably not 
favored in philosophical exper- 
iments, 62. 

Money-trees desirable, 155 — 
that they once existed shown 
to be variously probable, 156. 

Montaigne, a communicative old 
Gascon, 129. 

Monterey, battle of, its singular 
chromatic effect on a species 
of two-headed eagle, 103. 

Moses held up vainly as an ex- 
ample, 120 — construed by Joe 
Smith, ib. 

Myths, how to interpret readily, 
138. 

N. 

Naboths, Popish ones, how dis- 
tinguished, 75. 

Nation, rights of, proportionate 
to size, 70. 

National pudding, its effect on 
the organs of speech, a curious 
physiological fact, 75. 

Nephelim not yet extinct, 181. 

New England overpoweringly 
honored, 100 — wants no more 



speakers, ib. — done brown by 
whom, ib. — her experience in 
beans beyond Cicero's, 138. 
Newspaper, the, wonderful, 124 

— a strolling theatre, ib. — 
thoughts suggested by tearing 
wrapper of, 126 — a vacant 
sheet, ib. — a sheet in wliich a 
vision was let down, 127 — 
wrapper to a bar of soap, ib. 

— a cheap impromptu plat- 
ter, ib. 

New York, Letters from, com- 
mended, 130. 

Next life, what, 118. 

Niggers, 56 — area of abusing, 
extended, 97 — Mr. Sawin's 
opinions of, 173. 

Ninepence a day low for murder, 
64. 

No, a monosyllable, 75 — hard to 
utter, ib. 

Noah, inclosed letter in bottle, 
probably, 129. 

Nomas, Lapland, what, 157. 

North, has no business. 111 — 
bristling, crowded oflf roost, 
135. 

North Bend, geese inhumanly 
treated at, 136 — mentioned, 
162. 

North star, a proposition to in- 
dict, 115. 



Off ox, 133. 

Officers, miraculous transforma- 
tion in character of, 71 — An- 
glo-Saxon, come very near 
being anathematized, 72. 

O'Phace, Increase D., Esq., 
speech of, 93. 

Oracle of Fools, still respectful- 
ly consulted, 92. 

Orion, becomes commonplace, 
127. 

Orrery, Lord, his letters (lord !), 
130. 

Ostracism, curious species of, 92. 



P. 

Palestine, 72. 

Palfrey, Hon. J. G., 93, 100, 102 

(a worthy representative of 

Massachusetts). 



194 



INDEX. 



Pantagruel recommends a popu- 
lar oracle, 92. 

Panurge, his interview with 
Groatsnose, 139. 

Papists, female, slain by zealous 
Protestant bomb-shell, 160. 

Paralipomenon, a man suspected 
of being, 136. 

Paris, liberal principles safe as 
far away as, 120. 

Farliamentum Indoctorum, sit- 
ting in permanence, 92. 

Past, the, a good nurse, 109. 

Patience, sister, quoted, 66. 

Paynims, their throats propa- 
gandistically cut, 72, 

Penelope, her wise choice, 83. 

People, soft enough, 122 — want 
correct ideas, 152. 

Pepin, King, 137. 

Periwig, 134. 

Persius, a pithy saying of, 98, 
note. 

Pescara, Marquis, saying of, 60. 

Peter, Saint, a letter of {post- 
mortem), 131. 

Pharisees, opprobriously referred 
to, 120. 

Philippe, Louis, in pea-jacket, 
125. 

Phlegyas quoted, 117. 

Phrygian language, whether 
Adam spoke it, 62. 

Pilgrims, the, 96. 

Pillows, constitutional, 102. 

Pinto, Mx., some letters of his 
commended, 131. 

Pisgah, an impromptu one, 158. 

Platform, party, a convenient 
one, 153. 

Plato, supped with, 129 — his 
man, 136. 

Pleiades, the, not enough es- 
teemed, 127. 

Pliny, his letters not admired, 
130. 

Plotinus, a story of, 109. 

Plymouth Rock, Old, a Conven- 
tion wrecked on, 96. 

Point Tribulation, Mr. Sawin 
wrecked on, 155. 

Poles, exile, whether crop of 
beans depends on, 69, note. 

Polk, President, synonymous 
with our country, 80 — cen- 
sured, 96 — in danger of being 
crushed, 98. 

Polka, Mexican, 74. 



Pomp, a runaway slave, his nest, 
173 — hypocritically groans 
like white man, 174 — blmd to 
Christian privileges, 175 — his 
society valued at fifty doUars, 
ib. — his treachery, 176 — 
takes Mr. Sawin prisoner, 177 

— cruelly makes him work, ib. 

— puts himself illegally under 
his tuition, ib. — dismisses him 
with contumelious epithets, 
17,8. 

Pontifical bull, a tamed one, 
72. 

Pope, his verse excellent, 61. 

Pork, refractory in boiling, 72. 

Portugal, Alphonso the Sixth of, 
a monster, 180. 

Post, Boston, 83 — shaken visi- 
bly, 85 — too swift, ib. — edit- 
ed by a colonel, ib. — who is 
presumed oflflcially in Mexico, 
ib. — bad guide-post, 86 — re- 
ferred to, 104. 

Pot-hooks, death in, 140. 

Preacher, an ornamental symbol, 
119 — a breeder of dogmas, ib. 

— earnestness of, important, 
180. 

Present, considered as an annal- 
ist, 119 — not long wonderful, 
127. 

President, slaveholding natural 
to, 123 — must be a Southern 
resident, 153 — must own a 
nigger, 154. 

Prkiciple, exposure spoils it, 94. 

Principles, bad, when less harm- 
ful, 77. 

Prophecy, a notable one, 103. 

Proviso, bitterly spoken of, 133. 

Prudence, sister, her idiosyn- 
cratic teapot, 147. 

Psammeticus, an experiment of, 
62. 

Public opinion a blind and 
drunken guide, 76 — nudges 
Mr. Wilbur's elbow, ib. — 
ticklers of, 97. 

Pythagoras, a bean-hater, why, 
138. 

Pythagoreans, fish reverenced 
by, why, 107. 



Quixote, Don, 110. 



INDEX, 



196 



Rag, one of sacred college, 7G. 

Rantoul, Mr., talks loudly, GO — 
pious reason for not enlisting, 
ib. 

Recruiting Sergeant, Devil sup- 
posed the first, GO. 

Representatives' Chamber, 107. 

Rhinothism, society for promot- 
ing, 128. 

Rhyme, whether natural not 
considered, CI. 

Rib, an infrangible one, 145. 

Richard the First of England, 
his Christian fervor, 72. 

Riches conjectured to have legs 
as well as wings, 115. 

Robinson, Mr. John P., his opin- 
ions fully stated, 79-81. 

Rocks, pocket full of, 147. 

Rough and Ready, 167 — a wig, 
168 — a kind of scratch, 169. 

Russian eagle turns Prussian 
blue, 103. 



S. 



Sabbath, breach of, 74. 

Sabellianism, one accused of, 
136. 

Saltillo, unfavorable view of, 67. 

Salt-river, in Mexican, what, 67. 

Samuel, Uncle, riotous, 102 — yet 
has qualities demanding rev- 
erence, 120 — a good provider 
for his family, 122 — an exor- 
bitant bill of, 100. 

Sansculottes, draw their wine 
before drinking, 114. 

Santa Anna, his expensive leg, 
152. 

Satan, never wants attorneys, 

72 — an expert talker by signs, 

73 — a successful fisherman 
with little or no bait, ib. — 
cunning fetch of, 77 — dislikes 
ridicule, 84 — ought not to 
have credit of ancient oracles, 
103, note. 

Satirist, incident to certain dan- 
gers, 77. 

Savages, Canadian, chance of re- 
demption offered to, 180. 

Sawin, B., Esquire, his letter not 
written in verse, 61 — a native 
of Jaalara, 62 — not regular 
attendant on Rev. Mr. Wil- 



bur's preaching, ib. — a fool, 
ib. — his statements trustwor- 
thy, 63 — his ornithological 
tastes, ib. — letter from, 64, 
141, 162 — his curious discov- 
ery in regard to bayonets, 65 

— displays proper family pride, 
66 — modestly confesses him- 
self less wise than the Queen 
of Sheba, 69 — the old Adam 
in, peeps out, 71 — a miles 
emeritus, 141 — is made text 
for a sermon, ib. — loses a 
leg, 143— an eye, 144 — left 
hand, 145 — four fingers of 
riglit hand, ib. — has six or 
more ribs broken, ib. — a rib 
of his infrangible, ib. — allows 
a certain amount of preterite 
greenness in himself, 146, 147 

— his share of spoil limited, 
147 — his opinion of Mexican 
climate, ib. — acquires proper- 
ty of a certain sort, 148 — hia 
experience of glory, 149 — 
stands sentry, and puns there- 
upon, 150 — undergoes martyr- 
dom in some of its most pain- 
ful forms, 151 — enters the 
candidating business, ib. — 
modestly states the (avail) 
abilities which qualify him for 
high political station, 151, 154 

— has no principles, 152 — a 
peaceman, ib. — unpledged, ib. 

— has no objections to owning 
peculiar property, but would 
not like to monopolize the 
truth, 154 — his account with 
glory, 155— a selfish motive 
huited in, ib. — sails for Eldo- 
rado, ib. — shipwrecked on a 
metaphorical promontory, ib. 

— parallel between, and Rev. 
Mr. Wilbur (not Plutarchian), 
157 — conjectured to have 
bathed in the river Selemnus, 
162 — loves plough wisely, but 
not too well, ib. — a foreign 
mission probably expected by, 
163 — unanimously nominated 
for presidency, 1G4 — his coun- 
try's father-in-law, 165 — no- 
bly emulates Cincinnatus, 166 

— is not a crooked stick, ib. 

— advises his adherents, ib. — 
views of, on present state of 
politics, 126-173 — popular en- 



196 



INDEX. 



thusiasm for, at Bellers's, and 
its disagreeable consequences, 
167 — inhuman treatment of, 
by Bellers, 168 — his opinion 
of the two parties, 169 — agrees 
with Mr. Webster, ib. — his 
antislavery zeal, 171 — his 
proper self-respect, ib. — his 
unaffected piety, 172 — his not 
intemperate temperance, 173 
— a thrilling adventure of, 173- 
179 — his prudence and econ- 
omy, 174 — bound to Captain 
Jakes, but regains liis freedom, 
175 — is taken prisoner, 176, 
177 — ignominiously treated, 
177, 178 — his consequent res- 
olution, 179. 
Sayres, a martyr, 108. 
Scaliger, saying of, 78. 
Scarabceus pilularius, 68. 
Scott, General, his claims to the 

presidency, 85, 88. 
Scythians, their diplomacy com- 
mended, 139. 
Seamen, colored, sold, 59. 
Selemnus, a sort of Lethean 

river, 162. 
Senate, debate in, made reada- 
ble, 108. 
Seneca, saying of, 77 — another, 
103 — overrated by a saint (but 
see Lord Bolingbroke's opin- 
ion of, in a letter to Dean 
Swift), 130— his letters not 
commended, ib. — a son of 
Eev. Mr. Wilbur, 158. 
Serbonian bog of literature, 107. 
Sextons, demand for, 66 — he- 
roic official devotion of one, 
179. 
Shaking fever, considered as an 

employer, 148. 
Shakspeare, a good reporter, 91. 
Sham, President, honest, 97. 
Sheba, Queen of, 69. 
Sheep, none of Rev. Mr. Wil- 
bur's turned wolves, 62. 
Shem, Scriptural curse of, 178. 
Show, natural to love it, 67, 

note. 
Silver spoon born in Democra- 
cy's mouth, what, 98. 
Sinai, suffers outrages, 119. 
Sin, wilderness of, modern, what, 

119. 
Skin, hole in, strange taste of 
some for, 149. 



Slaughter, whether God strength- 
en us for, 74. 

Slaughterers and soldiers com- 
pared, 160. 

Slaughtering nowadays is slaugh- 
tering, 161. 

Slavery of no color, 56 — corner- 
stone of liberty, 105 — also 
key-stone. 111 — last crumb of 
Eden, 115 — a Jonah, 116 — an 
institution, 134 — a private 
State concern, 174. 

Smith, Joe, used as a translation, 
120. 

Smith, John, an interesting char- 
acter, 128. 

Smith, Mr., fears entertained 
for, 117 —dined with, 129. 

Smith, N. B., his magnanimity, 
125. 

Soandso, Mr., the great, defines 
his position, 125. 

Sol, the fisherman, 68 — sound- 
ness of respiratory organs hy- 
pothetically attributed to, ib. 

Solon, a saying of, 76. 

Spanish, to walk, what, 70. 

Speech-making, an abuse of gift 
of speech, 105. 

Star, north, subject to indict- 
ment, whether, 115. 

Store, cheap cash, a wicked 
fraud, 158. 

Strong, Governor Caleb, a pa- 
triot, 82. 

Swearing, commended as a figure 
of speech, 63, note. 

Swift, Dean, threadbare saying 
of, 85. 

T. 

Tag, elevated to the Cardinal- 
ate, 76. 

Taxes, direct, advantages of, 
159. 

Taylor zeal, its origin, 167 — 
General, greased by Mr. 
Choate, 170. 

Thanks, get lodged, 149. 

Thirty-nine articles might be 
made serviceable, 75. 

Thor, a foolish attempt of, 110. 

Thumb, General Thomas, a valu- 
able member of society, 101. 

Thunder, supposed in easy cir- 
cumstances, 102. 

Thynne, Mr., murdered, 60. 



INDEX. 



197 



Time, an innocent personage to 
Bwear by, G3 — a scene-shifter, 
126. 

Toms, Peeping, 128. 

Trees, various kinds of extraor- 
dinary ones, 155, 156. 

Trowbridge, William, mariner, 
adventures of, 74. 

Truth and falsehood start from 
same point, 78 — truth invul- 
nerable to satire, ib. — com- 
pared to a river, 91 — of fiction 
sometimes ti-uer than fact, ib. 
— told plainly, passim. 

Tuileries, exciting scene at, 103. 

Tully, a saying of, 94, note. 

Tweedledee, gospel according to, 
120. 

Tweedledum, great principles of, 
120. 



Ulysses, husband of Penelope, 
83 — borrows money, 157. (For 
full particulars of, see Homer 
and Dante.) 

University, triennial catalogue 
of, 87. 

V. 

Van Buren fails of gaining Mr. 
Sawin's confidence, 171 — his 
son John reproved, 172. 

Van, Old, plan to set up, 171. 

Venetians, invented something 
once, 157. 

Vices, cardinal, sacred conclave 
of, 76. 

Victoria, Queen, her natural ter- 
ror, 103. 

Vratz, Captain, a Pomeranian, 
singular views of, 60. 



W. 

Walpole, Horace, classed, 129 — 
his letters praised, 130, 

Waltham Plain, Comwallis at, 
64. 

"Walton punctilious in his inter- 
course with fishes, 75. 

War, abstract, horrid, 133 — its 
hoppers, grist of, what, 149. 

Warton, Thomas, a story of, 



Washington, charge brouglit 
against, 165. 

Washington, city of, climatic in- 
fluence of, on coats, 95 — men- 
tioned, 108 — grand jury of, 
115. 

Washingtons, two hatched at a 
time by improved machine, 
165. 

Water, Taunton, proverbially 
weak, 173. 

Water-trees, 156. 

Webster, some sentiments of, 
commended by Mr. Sawin, 
169. 

Westcott, Mr., his horror, 115. 

Whig party, has a large throat, 
86 — but query as to swallow- 
ing spiurs, 170. 

White-house, 135. 

Wife-trees, 156. 

Wilbur, Rev. Homer, A. M., con- 
sulted, 53 — liis mstructions to 
his flock, 62 — a proposition of 
his for Protestant bombshells, 
75 — his elbow nudged, 76 — 
his notions of satire, 77 — 
some opinions of his quoted 
with apparent approval by 
Mr. Biglow, 81 — geographical 
speculations of, 82 — a justice 
of the peace, ib. — a letter of, 
83 — a Latin pun of, 84 — runs 
against a post without injury, 
85 — does not seek notoriety 
(whatever some malignants 
may affirm), 87 — fits youths 
for college, 88 — a chaplain dur- 
ing late war with England, 90 

— a shrewd observation of, 92 
— some curious speculations of, 
105-107 — his martello-tower, 
106 — forgets he is not m pul- 
pit, 116, 141, 143 — extracts 
from sermon of, 118, 124 — 
interested in John Smith, 129 

— his views concerning pres- 
ent state of letters, 128-131 — 
a stratagem of, 136 — ventures 
two hundred and fourth inter- 
pretation of Beast in Apoca- 
lypse, 137 — christens Hon. B. 
Sawin, then an infant, 141 — 
an addition to our sylva pro- 
posed by, 155 — curious and 
instructive adventure of, 157 

— his account with an unnat- 
ural uncle, 160 — his uncom- 



198 



INDEX. 



fortable imagination, ib. — 
speculations concerning Cin- 
cinnatus, 162, 163 — confesses 
digressive tendency of mind, 
179 — goes to work on sermon 
(not without fear that his read- 
ers will dub him with a re- 
proachful epithet like that 
with which Isaac AUerton, a 
Mayflower man, revenges him- 
self on a delinquent debtor of 
his, calling him in his will, and 
thxis holding him up to pos- 
terity, as " John Peterson, 
The Bore " ), 181. 



Wilbur, Mrs. , an invariable rule 

of, 88 — her profile, ib. 

Wind, the, a good Samaritan, 
142. 

Wooden leg, remarkable for so- 
briety, 144 — never eats pud- 
ding, 145. 

Wright, Colonel, providentially 
rescued, 68. 

Wrong, abstract, safe to oppose, 
97, 



Z. 



Zack, Old, 166. 



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